On July 8, 2025, physicists from Aalto University in Finland achieved a major milestone: for the first time, a transmon qubit reached an echo coherence time in the millisecond range — with a peak around 1 ms and a median of approximately 0.5 ms. The previous state-of-the-art hovered below 0.6 ms.
This breakthrough was made using standard cleanroom fabrication techniques and was published in Nature Communications. The results are reproducible and do not rely on exotic conditions — making this achievement all the more significant.
Why does it matter?
- Longer coherence time allows significantly more complex quantum operations to be executed without decoherence.
- This reduces the overhead for quantum error correction — a key step toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.
- The fact that the team used accessible cleanroom infrastructure suggests that world-class results are possible without billion-dollar labs.
What’s next?
This record opens the door to several important developments:
- Scaling up to multi-qubit arrays while maintaining similar coherence times.
- Embedding these qubits into logical constructs for error correction.
- Applying the same techniques to other qubit architectures, such as fluxonium or neutral atom platforms.
- Translating this approach into industrial fabrication for next-gen quantum systems.
Commentary (The Quantum Strong Perspective)
Let’s be real: One millisecond might not sound like much — unless you live in the quantum world. There, it’s an eternity. While others are still struggling in the microsecond swamp, these Finns just walked into the quantum hall of fame with a sign that says: “Yes, we’ve arrived.”
Even more exciting: this wasn’t some freak incident in a fancy lab — it was done with reproducible methods in a university cleanroom. If they manage to link multiple qubits of this quality, we’re no longer talking about lab curiosities, but serious quantum hardware with real-world potential.
🔗 Source: SciTechDaily – via Nature Communications, July 8, 2025
