Physicists at Aalto University and VTT Technical Research Center of Finland have developed a new detector for measuring energy quanta at unprecedented resolution. This discovery could help bring quantum computing out of the laboratory and into real-world applications. The results have been published today in Nature.

The type of detector the team works on is called a bolometer, which measures the energy of incoming radiation by measuring how much it heats up the detector. Professor Mikko Möttönen’s Quantum Computing and Devices group at Aalto has been developing their expertise in bolometers for quantum computing over the past decade, and have now developed a device that can match current state-of-the-art detectors used in quantum computers.

“It is amazing how we have been able to improve the specs of our bolometer year after year, and now we embark on an exciting journey into the world of quantum devices,” says Möttönen.