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[...] The team, working with collaborators at Lincoln Laboratory and PNNL [(Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)], first had to design an experiment to calibrate the impact of known levels of radiation on superconducting qubit performance. To do this, they needed a known radioactive source -- one which became less radioactive slowly enough to assess the impact at essentially constant radiation levels, yet quickly enough to assess a range of radiation levels within a few weeks, down to the level of background radiation.
The group chose to irradiate a foil of high purity copper. When exposed to a high flux of neutrons, copper produces copious amounts of copper-64, an unstable isotope with exactly the desired properties.
"Copper just absorbs neutrons like a sponge," says [MIT physics professor Joseph] Formaggio, who worked with operators at MIT's Nuclear Reactor Laboratory to irradiate two small disks of copper for several minutes. They then placed one of the disks next to the superconducting qubits in a dilution refrigerator in [William] Oliver [associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and Lincoln Laboratory Fellow at MIT]'s lab on campus. At temperatures about 200 times colder than outer space, they measured the impact of the copper's radioactivity on qubits' coherence while the radioactivity decreased -- down toward environmental background levels.
The radioactivity of the second disk was measured at room temperature as a gauge for the levels hitting the qubit. Through these measurements and related simulations, the team understood the relation between radiation levels and qubit performance, one that could be used to infer the effect of naturally occurring environmental radiation. Based on these measurements, the qubit coherence time would be limited to about 4 milliseconds.
The team then removed the radioactive source and proceeded to demonstrate that shielding the qubits from the environmental radiation improves the coherence time. To do this, the researchers built a 2-ton wall of lead bricks that could be raised and lowered on a scissor lift, to either shield or expose the refrigerator to surrounding radiation.
[...] Every 10 minutes, and over several weeks, students in Oliver's lab alternated pushing a button to either lift or lower the wall, as a detector measured the qubits' integrity, or "relaxation rate," a measure of how the environmental radiation impacts the qubit, with and without the shield. By comparing the two results, they effectively extracted the impact attributed to environmental radiation, confirming the 4 millisecond prediction and demonstrating that shielding improved qubit performance.
Journal Reference:
Antti P. Vepsäläinen, Amir H. Karamlou, John L. Orrell, et al. Impact of ionizing radiation on superconducting qubit coherence [$], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2619-8)
(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Sunday August 30 2020, @05:36AM (3 children)
I guessed 17 because of your infatuation with the word "fuck", and focus on whether or not I have sex as a form of insult. Kids of that age are mesmerized by the supposed power of the word, and the act. If you're actually 41, I find that sad. (Unfortunately, the current President of the US has eliminated all meaning from that phrase by his repetition of it.)
And "data storage engineers" are weenies, one step above "Website programmers" in terms of their actual knowledge. I'll raise you 20 years of hardcore firmware engineering, trading off assembly and C on custom silicon; my last project where I contributed significant code sold upwards of 100 million units. Followed by 10 years architecting custom silicon, where my last project was designed and expected to sell a billion units.
Along with that, I have a mastery of the English language to which you can only aspire.
Regardless, your understanding of both mathematics as well as US Standard English is woefully backwards. Good luck in your future endeavors.
(Score: 1) by fakefuck39 on Sunday August 30 2020, @10:27AM (2 children)
Well, since I understand common everyday expressions like 200 times slower or 200 times colder, and you do not, I believe mastery of the language is with me here.
By the way, saying you're one of those annoying people that women don't want to fuck you is not an insult about how much sex you have. If you took that ESL class, you'd understand. When you're so annoying that no one will fuck you, it's an insult about how annoying you are, and how much of a dork you are. Knowing you are a firmware engineer goes well with that. A an annoying person with zero social skills - that fits firmware engineer quite well. You write code. I did that - writing code, day after day, year after year, is fun, but it's what a shut-in loser does. A really ugly one too. Then some dba work, then I wanted to make some real money and had the social skills, so not only am I in data storage, I eventually went into in presales.
Some code you wrote is in a million units! You're a unit. I talk to c level execs and sell and roll out solutions for the biggest companies worldwide. You're not allowed in those meetings. You're a codemonkey - people who do the needful or go to devry are your company.
I'm sure for you, a presales engineer is even worse. Because you define "weenie" by how much of a nerd/codemonkey you are. In the real world, the world where every normal person uses things like "twice as cold" or "5 times cheaper" the weenie is the codemonkey.
It's nice you find me sad and all. No one cares about your opinions - not only do you not understand normal people-speak, you're the weird nerd guy who doesn't shower and plays video games. But to most people, you don't exist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2020, @03:05PM (1 child)
English isn't my only language. I speak two others. I find that people that speak more than one language tend to speak English better than native English speakers who brag about how good their English is. In fact I find the people that construct sentences and understand the nuances of words better than me and are more knowledgeable than me tend to speak five languages well. The most intelligent people I talk to are multilinguals and they can communicate in several languages very proficiently.
As someone who speaks more than one language I will say this in reading your comments. Your English sucks. Your paragraphs and sentences are poorly constructed. If you're just a monolingual you have absolutely nothing to brag about and I feel sorry for you. I find that monolinguals have a very shallow understanding of language and the way that multilinguals construct sentences implies a deeper understanding of language.
BTW, I do agree that the way the OP was worded is poor. "Common everyday words" that are loosely constructed shouldn't be included in a supposedly rigorous scientific paper. I want to see specificity. I want to see that the authors at least made some effort to word their papers precisely.
One of the problems with saying that the temperature is 200 times hotter or colder is that how we define and scale temperature units is somewhat arbitrary. For example Fahrenheit scales differently than Celsius/Kelvin. Trying to determine that something is 200 times hotter or colder than something else is different than saying that something is 200 times taller or shorter than something else as units of a predefined distance scale proportionally.
(Score: 1) by fakefuck39 on Sunday August 30 2020, @11:06PM
I am fluent in French and Russian (and a bit of variants like Ukrainian/etc), and speak a tiny bit of Korean, and shitty but real Spain-Spanish. My wife speaks 4 languages - English, Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese. I've lived in 4 other countries - Japan, Catalonia, France, Russia, and traveled to about 40 countries and 49 states for work and fun.
I didn't read beyond your first sentence. You're still arguing you know English despite not understanding what 200 times colder means. You're just an idiot.