Researchers at the University of Surrey have published calculations showing that a qubit built from superfluid helium-3 could achieve error rates roughly 100 times lower than conventional superconducting qubits, potentially easing one of the hardest constraints on scaling quantum processors.

The design, described in npj Quantum Information, is the first reported qubit architecture based on a superfluid. The device — named the Superfluid Helium Oscillator Quantum (SHOQ) — exploits charge-neutral superfluid helium, which carries no electric charge and is therefore naturally shielded from the types of electromagnetic noise and stray charges that plague today's leading quantum hardware.

That immunity matters commercially. Superconducting circuits, the dominant qubit technology used by IBM, Google and most scaled quantum processors, are highly sensitive to electromagnetic disturbances. Even tiny disruptions corrupt the fragile quantum states that store information, and error rates compound as qubit counts grow. Error correction currently demands large physical-qubit overheads, so a qubit with intrinsically lower error rates would directly reduce the hardware needed to run useful computations.

From Theory to Specification

The study comes from Surrey's Quantum Sciences Group, led by Dr. Priya Sharma, Daphne Jackson Fellow in Hybrid Quantum Systems, in collaboration with Professor Jens Koch at Northwestern University. Koch was one of the researchers behind the transmon, the superconducting qubit design now used widely across the industry.

Sharma said: "We are not the first to think about the individual components behind this idea, but what we have done for the first time is bring them together in a microfluidic device and work out the specific details that could enable the device to function as a qubit.

"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."

Superfluid helium-3 is a frictionless liquid that flows without viscosity. The SHOQ device encodes quantum information in quantized oscillations of the superfluid within a microfluidic structure. Crucially, the numbers remain predictions until hardware exists: the 100x error-rate improvement is a calculated result, not a measured one.

Complement, Not Replacement

The Surrey team frames SHOQ as an addition to existing quantum stacks rather than a competitor to superconducting hardware. Dr. Eran Ginossar, Associate Professor in Surrey's Department of Physics and Advanced Technology Institute and co-author of the study, said: "We don't necessarily need one type of qubit to do everything. Combining different quantum technologies could allow us to take advantage of the strengths of each."

One concrete role is quantum memory. A superfluid-based qubit could store quantum information for extended periods while superconducting circuits perform the fast gate operations they are already good at — a hybrid division of labor that several architecture roadmaps view as a path to fault tolerance.

Ginossar added: "Superfluid helium gives us a fundamentally different type of quantum hardware to explore. If the predicted performance can be demonstrated experimentally, it could eventually work alongside existing superconducting technologies as part of a larger quantum system."

Cryogenic Requirements Already Demonstrated

The device requires extremely low operating temperatures, but researchers have already reached the necessary cryogenic conditions in earlier experiments with superfluid helium-3, removing one prerequisite barrier. The next step is building a prototype, an effort supported by an IAA Commercialisation Fellowship awarded to Sharma — a signal that the university sees a plausible path from lab physics toward commercializable intellectual property.

For the semiconductor and quantum supply chain, the significance is contingent: if the prototype reproduces the predicted error rates, superfluid-based qubits could shift the economics of quantum error correction by cutting the physical qubit overhead that today's systems require. Until experimental data arrives, SHOQ remains a rigorously specified design waiting for fabrication — but with a transmon pioneer attached to the project, the engineering credibility of the claim is stronger than most.