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Science 21 March 2003:
Vol. 299. no. 5614, pp. 1850 - 1851
DOI: 10.1126/science.1083001
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Perspectives

PHYSICS:
Flux Qubit Completes the Hat Trick

John Clarke

Superconducting circuits containing Josephson junctions have previously been shown to exist in superpositions of quantum states of electric charge and of superconducting phase. This superposition manifests itself in so-called Rabi oscillations between the two energy levels produced by the superposition. In his Perspective, Clarke highlights the report of Chiorescu et al., who demonstrate that a superconducting ring containing three Josephson junctions also exhibits Rabi oscillations, and thus exists in a superposition of magnetic flux states. The experiments are elegant demonstrations of quantum coherence in superconducting circuits, and are potentially of interest as "quantum bits" in a future quantum computer.

The author is in the Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA, and the Materials Sciences Department, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. E-mail: jclarke{at}physics.berkeley.edu

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)