Researchers are literally shooting quantum computers with particle beams to see exactly how space radiation shreds their data.
arXiv · March 16, 2026 · 2603.13124
Why it matters
Cosmic rays from deep space are a major source of errors for quantum computers, but they are hard to study because they hit randomly. Scientists have now hooked up an electron linear accelerator to a specialized refrigerator to bombard quantum chips on demand, creating a "shooting range" that reveals exactly how high-energy particles break quantum information.
From the abstract
Ionizing radiation is a known source of correlated errors in superconducting quantum processors, inhibiting the functionality of quantum error correction surface codes. High-energy photons and charged particles deposit pair-breaking energy into these systems leading to excess quasiparticles near Josephson junctions that increase qubit decoherence. Previous investigations of this problem have relied on ambient, stochastic sources of ionizing radiation or alternative methods of quasiparticle gener