What’s the plan for dealing with cosmic rays? I worry about when your beautiful angstrom-precision qubit networks encounter a relativistic proton or muon.
The fall off from low orbit to surface is substantial in both event numbers and energy level.
The higher energy cosmic sourced events at surface level are down in the hundred or less a second (IIRC).
If there's a plan it'd likely include having 9x redundancy hardware surrounded by water deep in a former salt mine .. that'd take cosmic ray events way down and provide a (best of three) x (tell me three times) "just in case" statistical sharpening.
You're welcome.
I trust you can do the math scaling from events per 42 litre volume to the volume in question here.
The altitude and air density factor in, any LEO applications have an increased risk, etc.
> The cross section is so small that the chance of it being hit over the lifetime of the product is ignorable.
Always a possibility under consideration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72#Potential_tri...
At an irrelevant scale. The cross sectional area of these devices will be 18 - 20 orders of magnitude smaller.
> Always a possibility under consideration...
We're talking about the cross section of a macro-scale (visible with the naked eye) chip vs. a cluster of a few dozen atoms. Certainly you can understand the difference of scale? Cosmic ray induced bit flips are extremely infrequent events at the datacenter scale.
What's the frequency at which a single, specific transistor will be struck? Not that a bit flip occurs somewhere in a large datacenter, but the chance of just a specific transistor being hit. Now reduce that 100-fold. That's the base rate we're talking about.
In the long-term vision of scaled-up nanotechnology, there will of course have to be redundancy and mechanisms for disabling, removing, and recycling (or incinerating) mechanisms destroyed by cosmic rays.
But in the near-term, it is an ignorable risk.