https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/09/210930140720.htm

An understanding of the nature of atomic-scale defects that contribute to qubit information loss is still largely lacking. The team helped bridge this gap between material properties and qubit performance by using state-of-the-art characterization capabilities at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) and National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), both U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facilities at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Their results pinpointed structural and surface chemistry defects in superconducting niobium qubits that may be causing loss.

"Superconducting qubits are a promising quantum computing platform because we can engineer their properties and make them using the same tools used to make regular computers," said Anjali Premkumar, a fourth-year graduate student in the Houck Lab at Princeton University and first author on the Communications Materials paper describing the research. "However, they have shorter coherence times than other platforms."