Colder Than Our Qubits: Quantum Brilliance Treats QWC to LN₂ Ice Cream—and a Vision for Room-Temperature Quantum

If you caught the liquid-nitrogen ice-cream bar at Quantum World Congress today, you met our friends at Quantum Brilliance—and yes, it really was “colder than our qubits.” But whether or not you caught the ice cream, we want to make sure you catch their new paper on how to build scalable, room-temperature diamond quantum devices.

Why it matters: the paper lays out how nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond enable quantum computing and sensing at room temperature, avoiding bulky cryogenics and opening the door to rugged, edge-deployable systems—what the authors call diamond “quantum accelerators.”

The challenge is scaling. Current top-down ion-implantation methods can’t deliver the precision or reproducibility needed at the nanometer scale. Quantum Brilliance’s team describes a bottom-up, atomically precise approach—adapting hydrogen de-passivation lithography and CVD overgrowth—to place NV centers deterministically in closely spaced 2D arrays. The goal: ~5–10 nm spacing with ±1 nm placement accuracy so adjacent NV electron spins can couple reliably for fast two-qubit gates, while preserving their negative charge state.

For sensing, the same atom-scale control boosts uniformity and reduces magnetic noise, improving sensitivity at room temperature. The work highlights practical steps—surface preparation, selective chemisorption of nitrogen-containing precursors, and strategies to retain nitrogen during overgrowth—to make this vision real.

📄 Read the paper: Bottom-up fabrication of scalable room-temperature diamond quantum computing and sensing technologies by Lachlan Oberg, Cedric Weber, Hung-Hsiang Yang, Wolfgang Klesse, Philipp Reinke, Santiago Corujeira Gallo, Alastair Stacey, Christopher Pakes, and Marcus Doherty.