Superfluid helium qubit could cut quantum error rates 100-fold, Surrey team says

The proposed device is called the Superfluid Helium Oscillator Quantum, or SHOQ, device. According to ScienceDaily, which reported the University of Surrey work on 1 October, the design uses charge-neutral superfluid helium-3 to shield quantum information from electromagnetic noise, and the paper is the first reported design for a qubit based on a superfluid.

That claim matters because quantum computers are fragile in a boring, expensive way. Superconducting qubits, the dominant hardware today, are highly sensitive to electromagnetic noise and stray electrical charges, the same category of disturbance that makes hair cling to a balloon. Small disturbances can scramble stored information, and the problem gets harder as qubit counts grow.

Sharma's group is not claiming a working device. It is claiming a design with specifications.

"The maths tells us that it should work. We have taken what we already know about superfluid helium and quantum technologies and turned that into an educated design, with the parameters and specifications needed to build one. The next step is to make a prototype and put those predictions to the test," said Dr. Priya Sharma, Daphne Jackson Fellow in Hybrid Quantum Systems at Surrey and lead author of the study.

The proposal comes as governments, universities and companies push quantum hardware in several directions at once. On 27 September, the U.S. Department of Energy released a report titled "SCAC Quantum Committee Report: Path to an Integrated Quantum Future," as reported by Fermilab. The roadmap, chaired by Fermilab chief technology officer Anna Grassellino with University of Chicago professor Supratik Guha as vice chair, sets a three-phase path: Quantum Grand Challenges from 2026 to 2028, then a DOE Quantum Computing User Facility, then integration of quantum co-processors and sensors into DOE's high-performance computing and AI networks from 2030 onward.

The report's headline target is a scientifically relevant, error-corrected quantum computer by 2028. It explicitly says success should be measured by scientific utility rather than hardware milestones, and that the DOE facility should not be a commercial "black box" cloud service.

Universal operations and a 25-year measurement problem

Two other recent results show how varied the paths to useful quantum computing have become. On 25 September, ScienceDaily reported that researchers from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, Harvard, Stony Brook University and Quantinuum demonstrated a universal gate set using non-Abelian anyons on Quantinuum's H2 trapped-ion processor with 54 entangled qubits. The work, published in Nature, combined braiding and fusion operations.

Quantinuum's Henrik Dreyer described non-Abelian codes as "a dark horse in the race to quantum error correction" and said the result shows fault-tolerant computation can in principle be done without magic state distillation or cultivation, which he called the most expensive operations in standard error correction. The older 2024 experiment on the same hardware created anyons tied to the D4 symmetry group, but braiding alone was not enough for universal computation. The new run switched to the S3 symmetry group, the rotations and mirror-image flips that leave an equilateral triangle unchanged.

Separately, Kyoto University and Hiroshima University researchers reported on 29 September a method for identifying W states, a form of multi-photon entanglement. More than 25 years after the equivalent measurement was proposed for GHZ states, the team demonstrated it for three-photon W states, according to corresponding author Shigeki Takeuchi. The work could feed into quantum teleportation and measurement-based quantum computing.

None of these results makes the others redundant. Surrey's SHOQ device is a design, not a measurement. The Quantinuum result is an experimental demonstration on existing hardware. The Kyoto work is a measurement technique for photonic states. The DOE roadmap is a funding and infrastructure plan.

What the superfluid design still needs

The Surrey team says the SHOQ device could eventually work alongside superconducting hardware rather than replace it, or act as quantum memory while other qubits compute. Co-author Dr. Eran Ginossar, associate professor at Surrey's Department of Physics and Advanced Technology Institute, said combining different quantum technologies could let researchers use the strengths of each, and that superfluid helium offers "a fundamentally different type of quantum hardware to explore."

The device would need extremely low temperatures, but the researchers note that the necessary conditions have already been reached in previous superfluid helium-3 experiments. The project was led by Surrey with Professor Jens Koch at Northwestern University, who was involved in developing the transmon, a superconducting qubit design now widely used. Sharma's prototype work is supported by an IAA Commercialisation Fellowship.

Until that prototype exists, the 100-fold figure remains a prediction from a paper, not a measured result. The same applies to the integration story: a design that could in principle sit beside superconducting qubits is not the same as one that does.