To Tune Up Your Quantum Computer, Better Call an AI Mechanic

A high-end race car engine needs all its components tuned and working together precisely to deliver top-quality performance. The same can be said about the processor inside a quantum computer, whose delicate bits must be adjusted in just the right way before it can perform a calculation. According to a team that includes scientists at JQI and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), it's an artificial intelligence, that's who. The team's paper in the journal Physical Review Applied outlines a way to teach an AI to make an interconnected set of adjustments to tiny quantum dots, which are among the many promising devices for creating the quantum bits, or "qubits," that would form the switches in a quantum computer's processor. Precisely tweaking the dots is crucial for transforming them into properly functioning qubits, and until now the job had to be done painstakingly by human operators, requiring hours of work to create even a small handful of qubits for a single calculation. A practical quantum computer with many interacting qubits would require far more dots -- and adjustments -- than a human could manage, so the team's accomplishment might bring quantum dot-based processing closer from the realm of theory to engineered reality.