Dark Matter Quantum Information Science
Dark Matter/Quantum Information Science

Qubit Decoherence

Quantum information science (QIS) has become a quickly growing field, with huge efforts toward developing quantum bits, or qubits, for quantum computing. A qubit is akin to a computational bit represented by a two-state quantum system, encoding a “0” or a “1” respectively (see Figure 1). However, the current barrier for qubit technology is its sensitivity to the environment, where stray signals can cause the qubit to decohere, losing the information it was storing. While this is one of the central problems in the quantum computing field, such a sensitivity to the environment can allow us to capture sub-eV energy deposits.

Figure 1: Visualizing qubit states and operations can be achieved through the Bloch sphere model. Each point on the sphere encodes a particular state of the qubit, expressed as a combination of ∣0⟩ and ∣1⟩ with complex coefficients. A π/2 pulse rotates the qubit from the ∣0⟩ state into a superposition involving both basis states. [Jazaeri et al. 2019]

Recent overview talk on the quantum information applications of DMQIS work