Argonne’s electron-on-neon qubit reports ultra-low noise in Nature Electronics study

A qubit made from a single electron hovering above a frozen film of neon has posted noise levels thousands of times lower than most traditional qubits, according to a study led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Notre Dame.

The findings, published in Nature Electronics, position the electron-on-neon approach as a strong contender for high-performance quantum technologies. "In previous work, we demonstrated the outstanding performance of our electron-on-neon qubit," said Xu Han, an Argonne scientist and co-corresponding author.

"By thoroughly characterizing the qubit’s noise properties, this latest study shows why its performance is so good. Our results prove that our technology is promising for quantum information processing at larger scales." The platform, first demonstrated at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials in 2022, is built by freezing neon gas into a solid and spraying electrons from a light bulb filament onto the surface.

A specially designed electrode traps a single electron just above the neon, where its motion encodes the qubit’s 0 and 1 states. A resonator sends microwave pulses to control and read out the qubit. The Center for Nanoscale Materials is a DOE Office of Science user facility.

Qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers, are extraordinarily sensitive to environmental disturbances such as stray electromagnetic fields, heat, and vibrations—collectively known as noise. Most chip-based qubits today are made from semiconducting or superconducting materials, which have shown strong performance in experiments but can be limited by material defects, embedded charges, and fabrication variability.

The electron-on-neon platform has the potential to address these limitations by operating a qubit in an ultra-clean environment just above an inert solid surface. A follow-up Argonne-led study in 2023 reported a coherence time of 0.1 milliseconds for the electron-on-neon qubit—nearly a thousand times better than the previous record for conventional semiconducting qubits and competitive with the highest-performing superconducting qubits.

The latest work was conducted with collaborators from the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Northeastern University, and Florida State University. While quantum computing remains an emerging technology, lower noise and longer coherence, as demonstrated here, could make it easier to scale systems that might one day tackle problems such as designing new medicines or optimizing complex supply chains.