Re: "Moving them apart makes the tunneling probability drop off exponentially" Hmmmm... At the vanishingly small absolute temperatures of current quantum computers, the Compton wavelength grows to become not very small; analogy to "slowing (i.e., 'cooling') neutrons to enhance probability of interaction in an atomic reactor". At 07:37 AM 12/17/2019, Mike Stay wrote:

On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 8:28 AM Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:

...

Remind me again how we're planning to insulate qubits from the environment ?

In this particular case, the phonons tunnel from one resonator to the other. Moving them apart makes the tunneling probability drop off exponentially.

For the more general case, topological qubits like nonabelian anyons (think "smoke rings of charge that pass through each other") are likely to be very resilient to environmental noise. -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike https://reperiendi.wordpress.com