First author ISTA PhD student Alejandro Andrés-Juanes in the lab. (Courtesy: © ISTA)"> First author ISTA PhD student Alejandro Andrés-Juanes in the lab. (Courtesy: © ISTA)

Qubits are delicate and often misbehave. A qubit’s advantage over an ordinary bit is that in addition to “0” or “1”, it can hold values of 0 and 1 at once, in a specific combination; that combination is what quantum algorithms actually run on. But any stray interaction with the surrounding world (a vibration, a stray field, a single errant photon) leaks out a bit of information about which state the qubit is in – and that’s enough to collapse the combination back into an ordinary, classical either/or state. Coupling to the environment leads to high decoherence, meaning high error rates, and is normally how we lose good quality qubits.…