Scientists Just Built a Fridge 180 Times Colder than Deep Space—It Could Unlock the Quantum Era

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Quantum computers require extremely cold temperatures to maintain coherence, but creating a refrigerator big enough to scale with all the hardware and wiring isn’t easy.

• IBM announced earlier this month the creation of a modular system that relies on dilution refrigeration to chill things down to just 15 millikelvins.

• This ability to scale cooling architecture with computing power will hopefully help IBM reach its goal of creating a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029.

Quantum computing is a delicate technology that requires pinpoint energy accuracy, and that means heat, too. Heat causes atoms and electrons to randomly vibrate, and that thermal energy can cause qubits—the building blocks of quantum computing—to decohere and lose their beneficial quantum properties.

To avoid such temperature-induced mishaps, quantum tech companies need innovative ways to make things really, really cold. Since late 2018, IBM has been investigating ways to improve and scale up dilution refrigerators, a kind of cryogenic device that cools things down to just a dozen millikelvins or so, which is roughly –459.65 degrees Fahrenheit. To solve this problem, the company began “project Goldeneye” back in 2018 with the goal of creating a dilution refrigerator capable of housing a one-million-qubit quantum processor.