Amazon’s first quantum computing chip makes its debut

Ocelot consists of nine quantum bits, or qubits, on a chip about a centimeter square, which, like some forms of quantum hardware, must be cryogenically cooled to near absolute zero in order to operate. Five of the nine qubits are a type of hardware that the field calls a “cat qubit,” named for Schrödinger’s cat, the famous 20th-century thought experiment in which an unseen cat in a box may be considered both dead and alive. Such a superposition of states is a key concept in quantum computing. The cat qubits AWS has made are tiny hollow structures of tantalum that contain microwave radiation, attached to a silicon chip. The remaining four qubits are transmons—each an electric circuit made of superconducting material. In this architecture, AWS uses cat qubits to store the information, while the transmon qubits monitor the information in the cat qubits. This distinguishes its technology from Google’s and IBM’s quantum computers, whose computational parts are all transmons. Notably, AWS ... Read full article.