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Volume 601 Issue 7893, 20 January 2022

Volume 601 Issue 7893

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High fidelity

The cover image shows an artist’s impression of spin qubits, the building blocks of a silicon quantum computer. The two red spheres are atomic nuclei surrounded by the wavefunction of an associated electron (the ellipse). The four ‘lobes’ represent entanglement between the qubits. In this week’s issue, three papers independently present silicon-based quantum-computing platforms that used multiqubit entanglement: one, from Andrea Morello and colleagues, relies on atoms implanted in silicon (shown), the other two, from Lieven Vandersypen and Seigo Tarucha and their respective co-workers, work with electrons in quantum dots. Crucially, all three systems have achieved fidelity in excess of 99%, which means that errors occur less than once every 100 operations. This is a key threshold for error correction that could make quantum computers based on silicon qubits a viable proposition — one that could make ready use of long-established chip manufacturing technologies.

Cover image: Tony Melov

This Week

News in Focus

Opinion

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Research

    News & Views

  • News & Views |

    Cell-free RNA transcripts in maternal blood can be analysed to monitor the progression of pregnancy and to predict a potentially harmful pregnancy-specific condition called pre‑eclampsia.

    • Lydia L. Shook
    • Andrea G. Edlow

  • News & Views |

    A silicon-based quantum-computing platform has met key standards for reducing error — setting the stage for quantum devices that could benefit from established semiconductor microchip technologies.

    • Ada Warren
    • Sophia E. Economou

  • News & Views |

    The chirality, or handedness, of nanoparticles is shown to be a key factor in determining how well such particles engage with the immune system — a finding that might help to inform the design of vaccines and anticancer therapeutics.

    • Alexander Hooftman
    • Luke A. J. O’Neill

  • News & Views |

    Archival images of glacial ice on a Norwegian archipelago, together with the islands’ climatic diversity, enable application of an innovative method for making long-term projections of ice loss using short-term observations.

    • Twila A. Moon

  • News & Views |

    Advances in the precision of radiocarbon dating can offer year-specific data. Analyses of archaeological sites in Denmark and Canada provide insights into the chronology of the global networks of the Viking Age.

    • James H. Barrett

    • Articles

  • Article |

    Three-dimensional analysis of the solar neighbourhood shows that nearly all star-forming regions near the Sun lie on the surface of the Local Bubble, which was inflated by supernovae about 14 million years ago.

    • Catherine Zucker
    • Alyssa A. Goodman
    • Cameren Swiggum

  • Article | | Open Access

    A spin-based quantum processor in silicon achieves single-qubit and two-qubit gate fidelities above 99.5% using gate-set tomography, exceeding the theoretical threshold required for fault-tolerant quantum computing.

    • Xiao Xue
    • Maximilian Russ
    • Lieven M. K. Vandersypen

  • Article |

    Universal quantum logic operations with fidelity exceeding 99%, approaching the threshold of fault tolerance, are realized in a scalable silicon device comprising an electron and two phosphorus nuclei, and a fidelity of 92.5% is obtained for a three-qubit entangled state.

    • Mateusz T. Mądzik
    • Serwan Asaad
    • Andrea Morello

  • Article | | Open Access

    A triple phase transition, where changing a single parameter simultaneously gives rise to metal–insulator, topological and a parity–time symmetry-breaking phase transitions, is observed in non-Hermitian Floquet quasicrystals.

    • Sebastian Weidemann
    • Mark Kremer
    • Alexander Szameit

  • Article | | Open Access

    Small-molecule serial femtosecond X-ray crystallography (smSFX) characterizes microcrystals by indexing sparse serial XFEL diffraction frames, with little sample preparation, without beam damage, and at room temperature and pressure.

    • Elyse A. Schriber
    • Daniel W. Paley
    • J. Nathan Hohman

  • Article | | Open Access

    The satellite instrument TROPOMI is used to assess ambient NO2 levels at approximately one-kilometre resolution across 215 cities worldwide during COVID-19 lockdowns, finding about 30% lower NO2 concentrations in countries with strict lockdowns.

    • Matthew J. Cooper
    • Randall V. Martin
    • Chris A. McLinden

  • Article |

    Disturbances in the radiocarbon record anchor a precisely dated archaeological stratigraphy of a medieval trading emporium in Denmark in time, revealing that the Viking expansion was associated with competition for trade routes rather than with raids.

    • Bente Philippsen
    • Claus Feveile
    • Søren M. Sindbæk

  • Article |

    High-dimensional datasets derived from time-resolved live imaging of leukocytes in mice were used to identify leukocyte identities and dynamic neutrophil states with high cellular resolution.

    • Georgiana Crainiciuc
    • Miguel Palomino-Segura
    • Andrés Hidalgo

  • Article | | Open Access

    PROTAC degrader–induced SWI/SNF inactivation abolishes DNA accessibility at enhancer elements of oncogenes and also tempers supra-physiologic expression of driver transcription factors, resulting in potent inhibition of tumour growth in mouse models.

    • Lanbo Xiao
    • Abhijit Parolia
    • Arul M. Chinnaiyan

  • Article |

    V-SYNTHES, a scalable and computationally cost-effective synthon-based approach to compound screening, identified compounds with a high affinity for CB2 and CB1 in a hierarchical structure-based screen of more than 11 billion compounds.

    • Arman A. Sadybekov
    • Anastasiia V. Sadybekov
    • Vsevolod Katritch

  • Article |

    The cryo-electron microscopy structure of the glucocorticoid receptor (GR)-loading complex—a complex in which Hsp70 loads GR onto Hsp90 and Hop—is described, providing insights into how the chaperones Hsp90 and Hsp70 coordinate to facilitate GR remodelling for activation.

    • Ray Yu-Ruei Wang
    • Chari M. Noddings
    • David A. Agard

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