In a recent Nature paper, a team led by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Argonne National Laboratory has announced the creation of a new qubit platform formed by freezing neon gas into a solid at very low temperatures, spraying electrons from a light bulb’s filament onto the solid and trapping a single electron there. This system shows great promise to be developed into ideal building blocks for future quantum computers.

Kater Murch, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is a senior co-author of the paper. He explains some of the science behind the discovery in this short video animation: