Josephson junction based quantum computing

Among the physical realizations of the elements required for quantum computation nano-scale electronic devices [2, 10, 12, 16] are very promising. They can be easily integrated into electronic circuits and scaled up to large numbers of qubits. Here we describe qubits based on low-capacitance Josephson junctions. In these systems Coulomb blockade effects allow the control of the charge on a superconducting island. They constitute quantum bits, with logical states differing by the charge on one island. Single- and two-bit operations can be performed by manipulating applied gate voltages. The phase coherence time is sufficiently long to allow a series of these steps. In addition to the manipulation of qubits, the resulting quantum state can be read out by coupling a single-electron transistor capacitively to the qubit.