Quantum engineers have spent years trying to tame the fragility of qubits, only to be thwarted by the tiniest imperfections in the materials they use. Now a new line of research flips that problem on its head, turning crystal defects into structured pathways that can shuttle quantum information with far greater stability. Instead of polishing materials toward impossible perfection, scientists are learning to treat flaws as a design feature for scalable solid-state qubits.
By deliberately engineering the right kind of disorder inside crystals, researchers are carving out what amount to quantum superhighways, where information can move along protected routes rather than getting lost in a noisy landscape. The approach promises a more practical route to large quantum processors that can be manufactured in bulk, rather than handcrafted in ultra-clean labs for each new experiment.
From fragile qubits to engineered defects
At the heart of the quantum computing challenge is a simple contradiction: qubits must be exquisitely isolated from their environment to preserve delicate superpositions, yet they also need to interact with one another to perform useful calculations. Traditional solid-state designs try to solve this by minimizing every imperfection in a crystal lattice, treating defects as enemies that scatter electrons, scramble spins, and shorten coherence times. The new work coming out of Jan and colleagues instead starts from the premise that some defects can be tamed, patterned, and even optimized to host robust qubits if they are understood at the atomic level.
In this framework, line defects in a crystal, known as dislocations, are no longer random scars but potential conduits for quantum states. Researchers in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engine have shown that when qubits are positioned near these extended imperfections, their quantum properties can actually improve rather than degrade. By carefully modeling how electrons and spins behave around such dislocations, the team led by Jan has mapped out how specific arrangements of atoms can create protected channels for information, effectively turning crystal flaws into controllable quantum structures that can be replicated across a chip.
How dislocations become quantum highways
The key physical insight is that a dislocation subtly distorts the symmetry of the surrounding crystal, reshaping the energy levels available to electrons and spins. Near the defect, the usual degeneracies are lifted and new configurations emerge that are less sensitive to environmental noise, especially to fluctuations in magnetic and electric fields. Jan and collaborators describe how this symmetry breaking near the dislocation creates special energy configurations known as clock transitions, where the qubit’s operating frequency barely shifts even when the environment jitters. That stability is exactly what large-scale quantum hardware has been missing.
By aligning qubits along these dislocation lines, the researchers effectively create one-dimensional tracks where quantum states can hop from site to site while remaining locked into these clock transitions. The result is a kind of built-in error suppression that does not rely on elaborate external control sequences. According to Jan, this improvement arises directly from the interplay between the defect’s strain field and the host crystal’s electronic structure, which together define a narrow corridor in which qubits can operate with longer coherence times and more predictable interactions.
Scaling solid-state qubits beyond laboratory prototypes
For quantum computing to move beyond bespoke laboratory devices, engineers need a way to connect thousands or millions of qubits without each one requiring its own custom environment. Jan and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engine team frame their work explicitly around this scaling problem, arguing that dislocation-based channels provide a natural wiring scheme inside the crystal itself. Instead of routing every interaction through external microwave lines or photonic links, the material hosts its own network of quantum connections, defined by where and how the dislocations are introduced during growth.
That vision dovetails with broader efforts to identify solid-state platforms that can be manufactured with the same kind of repeatability that made classical silicon chips ubiquitous. In related content, Jan and colleagues highlight how expanding the search for quantum-ready 2D materials and exploring how quantum calculations expose hidden chemistry of ice both feed into a more general toolkit for designing defects with purpose. By treating dislocations, vacancies, and other irregularities as tunable elements rather than random nuisances, they sketch a roadmap where scalable solid-state qubits are built into the crystal from the start, rather than patched on afterward with complex control hardware.
Clock transitions and the physics of stability
Clock transitions are a familiar concept in precision metrology, where atomic clocks rely on transitions that are insensitive to certain perturbations to keep time with extraordinary accuracy. The novelty in Jan’s work is to show that similar protected transitions can be engineered in solid-state qubits by exploiting the local symmetry breaking around a dislocation. In the distorted region, the spin states of a defect center can be tuned so that their energy difference barely changes when the surrounding fields fluctuate, which dramatically reduces dephasing and extends coherence times.
According to detailed modeling, this improvement arises from symmetry breaking near the dislocation, which creates specific states, called clock transitions, that are inherently less vulnerable to noise. The same calculations indicate that these protected states can be accessed with realistic control fields and that their robustness persists across a range of temperatures and strain conditions relevant for future solid-state quantum technologies. That combination of theoretical grounding and practical feasibility is what makes the approach attractive for device designers who need both stability and manufacturability.
From proof of concept to full quantum architectures
The idea of using defects as qubits is not entirely new. Earlier work on nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond and color centers in silicon carbide showed that missing atoms or impurity complexes can host long-lived spins that behave as qubits. Over the summer, researchers studying defects in a crystal lattice reported that such imperfections can make stable qubits for quantum computers, highlighting how carefully chosen lattice defects can support coherent quantum states long enough to perform nontrivial operations. That study emphasized that, with the right engineering, defects can move from being a reliability problem to a foundational resource for a full-scale functioning computer.
What Jan and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engine group add is a systematic way to turn those isolated defect qubits into connected networks by harnessing line defects as quantum highways. Their work on building large-scale quantum technologies focuses on reliable ways to connect individual qubits without destroying their fragile states, using the strain and symmetry landscape around dislocations as a built-in coupling mechanism. By positioning qubits near these line defects and exploiting the resulting clock transitions, they outline a path where quantum processors are not just sprinkled with useful defects but are architected around them from the ground up.
That shift in perspective, from fighting imperfections to programming them, could define the next phase of quantum hardware development. If Jan and colleagues are right, the most powerful quantum chips of the future may not be the smoothest crystals engineers can grow, but the ones with the most carefully sculpted flaws.
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