Linde to cool world-first quantum computer

GERMANY/AUSTRALIA: Renowned German refrigeration company Linde Engineering is to supply a cryogenic cooling plant to the world’s first utility-scale quantum computer in Brisbane, Australia.

The plant for leading photonic quantum computing company PsiQuantum will be one of the largest cryogenic cooling plants ever built for the specific use of operating a quantum computer. It will cool the cryogenic cabinets containing PsiQuantum’s new Omega chipset and other systems. 

Quantum computing is expected to drive advancements in healthcare, energy, material design, and encryption while the project in Brisbane further develops Australia’s quantum ecosystem across academia, commercial partnerships and supply chains.

Linde Engineering is one of very few companies worldwide with the required expertise to produce a large-scale cryogenic cooling infrastructure capable of achieving the required 4K range (-269°C, -452°F). 

The helium refrigeration plant is a closed circuit system with symmetrical mass flows. Two or more gas-carrying expansion turbines provide the required low-temperature cooling.

To speed up the cooling process, the refrigeration system can be designed with liquid nitrogen pre-cooling. Pre-cooling allows the helium cooling circuit to start cooling down at 80K. 

The company has installed more than 500 cryogenic plants in total, serving such high-tech industries as semiconductors, magnetic resonance imagining and supporting scientific applications like particle accelerators and fusion research.

The Australian Commonwealth and Queensland governments will invest AUD940m (US$620m) into PsiQuantum with the site set to be operational by the end of 2027.

The cryogenic plant will cool tens of thousands of PsiQuantum’s new Omega photonic chips housed in cabinets that will be networked together with standard optical fibre. Quantum computers use special bits called qubits, which, unlike classical bits, can be in a coherent superposition of multiple states simultaneously. This enables multiple simultaneous computations and thus solve problems much faster than classical computers. Qubits are susceptible to interactions with their environment, such as heat or electromagnetic radiation and cannot function reliably without appropriate cooling, which maintains qubits in a state where they preserve their quantum mechanical properties.

“Photons don’t feel to heat the way matter-based qubits do. Our systems can run 100 times warmer – and we appreciate collaborating with a world-class firm like Linde Engineering to deliver industrial-scale systems with proven technology,” said Jeremy O’Brien, CEO and co-founder of PsiQuantum. “This is a fundamental scaling advantage and a key reason we are able to move rapidly toward utility-scale quantum computing.”