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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Why is this the "holy grail"? Seems that room temperature quantum chips are not nearly as much of a big deal as, say, room temperature superconductors. You could keep a quantum chip in a special environment since they don't have to move around or span large areas.

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Have you seen the machinery needed to cool down IBM's tiny qubit chip at the bottom? [1] It would be nice if you could just stick these things into your PC over PCIe some day.

[1] https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4403/23518086798_3d3af8313e.jp...

Don't they keep it close to absolute zero though? There's a large range between absolute zero and room temperature.

That’s not even half that equipment needed to reach cryogenic temperatures. What you linked appears to be the experimental setup that will get placed in some sort of cold chamber.

On an unrelated note: room temperature quantum chips would likely be more energy efficient as the coolers that go that cold aren’t particularly efficient.

Source: I used to work for a cryogenics companies.

Most of what you see in that picture is commercially-available, commodity scientific-grade cryogenics gear. There are a handful of suppliers that make this kind of gear and it's probably pretty common across all of the superconducting QC research machines.

So yeah, it's crazy machinery, but it's not anything special to IBM. Hopefully there's pressure to miniaturize it, but ultimately do you want to have to worry about getting a Helium 3 delivery to be able to use your laptop?

>ultimately do you want to have to worry about getting a Helium 3 delivery to be able to use your laptop?

Hence why a room temperature quantum computing chip is a "holy grail"?

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