Emerging qubit systems: Guest editorial

Over the past few years, the field of quantum information science has seen tremendous progress toward realizing large-scale quantum computers. With demonstrations of quantum computers outperforming classical computers for a select range of problems,1–3 we have finally entered the noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing era. While the quantum computers of today are technological marvels, they are not yet error corrected, and it is unclear whether any system will scale beyond a few hundred logical qubits without significant changes to architecture and control schemes. Today's quantum systems are analogous to the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) and EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) systems of the 1940s, which ran on vacuum tubes. These machines were built on a solid, nominally scalable architecture and when they were developed, nobody could have predicted the development of the transistor and the impact of the resulting semiconductor industry. Simply put, the computers of today are nothing like the early computers of the 1940s. We believe that the qubits of future fault-tolerant quantum systems will look quite different from the qubits of the NISQ machines in operation today. This Special Topic issue is devoted to new and emerging quantum systems with a focus on enabling technologies that can eventually lead to the quantum analog to the transistor. We have solicited both research4–18 and perspective articles19–21 to discuss new and emerging qubit systems with a focus on novel materials, encodings, and architectures. We are proud to present a collection that touches on a wide range of technologies including superconductors,7–13,21 semiconductors,15–17,19 and individual atomic qubits.18