Graduate Student Seminar with Kaiwen Zheng on Many Improvements to the Single Electron on Neon Ice Experiment

Despite being the number one leading quantum computing platform as of today, superconducting circuits are still limited by decoherence from a material origin. It is unsure whether materials and microwave engineering alone can produce superconducting qubits with error rates lower than the threshold for fault-tolerant quantum computation. To potentially solve this problem, we fabricated a superconducting circuit chip that should be capable of storing its information in a single electron floating on the surface of a thin neon film. As the electron is floating in vacuum, it is expected to be much less affected by decoherence caused by material defects. Almost unsurprisingly, we found in the spring semester that applying a very large voltage at the gate electrodes can blow up the entire chip. In this talk, I’ll walk you through how we build our system back better after that incident.