Here we report a breakthrough in the fabrication of a long lifetime transmon qubit. We use tantalum films as the base superconductor. By using a dry etching process, we obtained transmon qubits with a best T1 lifetime of 503 μs. As a comparison, we also fabricated transmon qubits with other popular materials, including niobium and aluminum, under the same design and fabrication processes. After characterizing their coherence properties, we found that qubits prepared with tantalum films have the best performance. Since the dry etching process is stable and highly anisotropic, it is much more suitable for fabricating complex scalable quantum circuits, when compared to wet etching. As a result, the current breakthrough indicates that the dry etching process of tantalum film is a promising approach to fabricate medium- or large-scale superconducting quantum circuits with a much longer lifetime, meeting the requirements for building practical quantum computers.

Understanding the relationship between brain activity and specific mental function is important for medical diagnosis of brain symptoms, such as epilepsy. Magnetoencephalography (MEG), which uses an array of high-sensitivity magnetometers to record magnetic field signals generated from neural currents occurring naturally in the brain, is a noninvasive method for locating the brain activities. The MEG is normally performed in a magnetically shielded room. Here, we introduce an unshielded MEG system based on optically pumped atomic magnetometers. We build an atomic magnetic gradiometer, together with feedback methods, to reduce the environment magnetic field noise. We successfully observe the alpha rhythm signals related to closed eyes and clear auditory evoked field signals in unshielded Earth’s field. Combined with improvements in the miniaturization of the atomic magnetometer, our method is promising to realize a practical wearable and movable unshielded MEG system and bring new insights into medical diagnosis of brain symptoms.

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The effect of microwave treatment on the electric conductivity and structure of a polymer‐derived SiCN ceramic is studied. It is found that the conductivity of the microwave‐treated sample is about 40 times higher than that of the conventional heat‐treated one at the same temperature and dwell time conventionally. The X‐ray diffraction patterns show that both samples are amorphous without obvious crystallization. Raman analysis reveals that the microwave‐treated sample exhibited a narrower full width at half maximum and upper‐shift of G peak. X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy spectra show that there is a significant sp3‐to‐sp2 transition of free carbon in the microwave‐treated sample. These results suggest that the microwave‐treatment can induce a distinct structure evolution of the free carbon, which contributes to the remarkable enhancement of the conductivity of the sample.

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