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MIT researchers using superconducting quantum bits connected to a microwave transmission line have shown how the qubits can generate on demand the photons, or particles of light, necessary for communication between quantum processors.

The advance is an important step toward achieving the interconnections that would allow a modular quantum computing system to perform operations at rates exponentially faster than classical computers can achieve.

"Modular quantum computing is one technique for reaching quantum computation at scale by sharing the workload over multiple processing nodes," says Bharath Kannan, MIT graduate fellow and first author of a paper on this topic published today in Science Advances. "These nodes, however, are generally not co-located, so we need to be able to communicate quantum information between distant locations."

In classical computers, wires are used to route information back and forth through a processor during computation. In a quantum computer, the information itself is quantum mechanical and fragile, requiring new strategies to simultaneously process and communicate information.