Silicon qubits stay more than 99.99% accurate — even with three running at once

Quantum computers fail in whispers: their bits, or qubits, drift out of tune the moment you run several together. A team at Japan's RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science, led by Leon Camenzind and Yi-Hsien Wu under project manager Seigo Tarucha, has shown a five-qubit silicon array — all controlled through a single shared microwave line — holding accuracy above 99.99% for up to three qubits operating in parallel, and about 99.9% with all five running. Writing in Nature Physics, they pinpointed the main source of error, a frequency shift called the AC Stark shift, and showed a calibration routine that cancels it. Silicon qubits matter because they can be built with the same factory know-how as ordinary computer chips — accuracy like this is what a manufacturable quantum computer needs.

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