A research team has cut the time needed to measure quantum information loss in superconducting qubits from roughly one second to about 10 milliseconds — a more than 100-fold improvement that works in near real time. The Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen led the international effort, with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) as a key partner. The journal Physical Review X published the result in 2026, volume 16, issue 1.

The finding matters because quantum computers still lose their data unpredictably, and until now researchers had no fast, dependable way to watch that loss as it happens.

Why does qubit stability matter?

Quantum computers process information in qubits rather than classical bits. That advantage comes with a cost: the quantum state decays, and the information stored in it disappears.

"In quantum computers, information is transmitted and stored using so-called qubits (quantum bits). But quantum information can quickly be lost," said Jeroen Danon, a professor at NTNU's Department of Physics and one of the study's authors.

The decay is not merely fast. It is erratic. For widely used superconducting qubits, the average lifetime of information is workable, but the actual value drifts randomly over time. That variation, not the average, has been the harder problem to attack, because slow measurements could only ever capture a blurred snapshot of a moving target.

Danon put it plainly: "In the widely used superconducting qubits, the time it takes for information to disappear is, on average, reasonable. But it seems to vary randomly over time."

Without knowing exactly how fast information disappears — and how that rate fluctuates — engineers cannot reliably improve processor performance. The gap between measurement speed and physical reality has slowed work on error correction and qubit design.

What does the new method change?

The technique measures relaxation rates adaptively while they fluctuate, rather than averaging them over long windows. A one-second measurement cycle previously buried the random variation the researchers most needed to see. Ten milliseconds brings the observation window close to the timescale of the fluctuations themselves.

"We managed to do it in approximately 10 milliseconds, i.e. more than 100 times faster. And more or less in real time," Danon said.

The speed gain is not just a convenience. It changes what is observable. Rapid, subtle changes in decay behavior — invisible to slower methods — now appear in the data.

"This will in turn make it easier to identify the underlying causes that make the information disappear," Danon said.

The author list points to the scale of the effort: 20 researchers across institutions, including Fabrizio Berritta, Jonas Bylander, Giovanna Tancredi, Morten Kjaergaard, Jacob Hastrup and Ferdinand Kuemmeth alongside Danon. The paper is titled "Real-Time Adaptive Tracking of Fluctuating Relaxation Rates in Superconducting Qubits."

What are the limits of the claim?

The source deserves scrutiny on one point. The paper demonstrates measurement speed, not qubit improvement. Nothing in the published claim states that the method has extended qubit lifetimes, reduced error rates, or improved gate fidelity in any processor. The advance is diagnostic: researchers can now watch the failure mode.

The path from diagnosis to treatment remains unbuilt. Identifying causes of information loss is a prerequisite for fixing them, not a fix itself. The NTNU announcement frames the result as progress toward stability and reliability, which is fair, but no timeline or quantitative performance target accompanies that framing.

There is also a scope question. The method targets superconducting qubits specifically. Other platforms — trapped ions, neutral atoms, photonic systems — face different decay mechanisms, and the paper does not claim transferability.

What comes next?

For quantum processor developers, the practical payoff would come from using real-time decay tracking to isolate the physical sources of noise — material defects, control electronics, packaging — and engineer them out. That work starts now that the measurement bottleneck is gone, and the competitive race to stabilize superconducting qubits gains a sharper instrument in the process.