PsiQuantum installed a helium cryo-plant at SLAC that cools to 2 K, not for the photonic qubits themselves but for superconducting single-photon detectors that need near-100% efficiency. The company plans to scale to thousands of chips per fridge and eventually 100 cabinets in a data-center-scale machine.
Let's first head to the Stanford Linear Accelerator, or SLAC for the nerds in the know.
So SLAC is the home of the largest X-ray laser now on the planet. It is powered by cryomodules that are operating at 2 Kelvin, not too far from absolute zero. Okay. This is what this cryo plant is about.
It's here that PsiQuantum has obtained a massive hunk of infrastructure in the form of a helium-based cryo plant. Cryoplants keep things very, very, very cold. And the cold is key for PsiQuantum's ability to detect the presence of single photons.
So this would be the fridge. So this is the fridge. Yeah. So inside here is basically just a big sheet of copper with holes in it, and we bolt as many chips as we can afford onto that cold plate. A few years ago, we sort of figured out we're going to need to run thousands of chips. To get to millions of qubits. And so we need something where we can stuff a lot more chips in a fridge and where we've got orders of magnitude more cooling power. And in a real machine, we'll have on the order of 100 cabinets like these.
You can see an example of what Pete's talking about with these renders of its future data centers. I'm sure this all seems quite nuts, but Psi actually doesn't need its quantum computers to be as cold as other quantum machines. It just needs the cold for one key operation.
The only reason that we are cooling our system is actually to support the single photon detector. So we need to be able to detect a single particle of light with near 100% efficiency. The only devices that can do that are superconducting devices where we need to be at low temperature, which is a pain in the ass. The qubit itself that we use is a photon. You know, if you think about a laser beam and imagine trying to heat it up, it wouldn't make any sense. So our qubit itself doesn't care about heat at all. It's just the detector that means that we have to resort to low temperature.
And everybody else is having to go even more extreme because their actual qubits do care about the temperature.
