The Coming Market for Room-temperature Superconducting Quantum Computers

Low-temperature, superconducting qubits have dominated the quantum computing (QC) space since the beginning of QC commercialization, with IBM being especially dominant in this part of the market. However, once QCs become more widespread beyond cloud services and hybrid systems become the norm, it can be assumed that engineers will be looking for new ways to remove hard, low-temperature constraints with room-temperature superconducting qubits. Refrigeration equipment for conventional superconducting QCs, can be over $1 million. A future dream for superconducting qubits is a room-temperature qubit.

This article suggests that room-temperature superconducting “minicomputers” would be based on different physics principles than today’s Josephson Junction theory. Nikolay Bogolyubov’s ‘liquid flow’ is a possibility for the future. Engineers would need to begin at first principles, because today’s superconducting qubit operation is joined to microwave frequency cables and related supporting hardware, which is a substantial supporting industry of its own.

For tomorrow’s room-temperature qubits, the design principles are the same as those that apply to low-temperature qubits - proper frequency range, large anharmonicity, long coherence time, etc. Current superconducting quantum technology implementations emphasizes transmon qubits especially, but cat-qubits, fluxoniums, Xmons, 3-junction flux qubits, and C-shunt flux qubits are coming out of the research laboratories. Once engineers have a stable, controllable, high-quality qubit, the environmental control of the qubit can and do, significantly improve the device’s performance.

Room-temperature superconducting QCs of the future would radically transform the QC market and bring quantum computing to smaller organizations, such as financial analyst firms. Classical minicomputers of the 1970s did much to bring computing into businesses at the expense of time-sharing. Room-temperature superconductors might do something similar for the quantum computing industry.