Proceedings of the 34th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
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Quantum computing promises new ways of solving some mathematical problems by making use of the state superposition properties of quantum bits (qubits) to compute in parallel all the results of a mathematical expression, which, in some cases, provides a computational advantage over classical computing. Various physical systems have been suggested as possible qubits. All of them have met significant challenges in their implementation into a quantum computer, in part because the usefulness of quantum computing is tied to its scalability. Electrons floating above superfluid helium are potential qubits because the exceptional lack of interaction with their surroundings should translate into extended quantum coherence times. Varying electric potentials are not expected to modify spin states, which allows their transport on helium using a charge-coupled device (CCD)-like array of underlying gates. That transport could move single qubits between memory, interaction and read-out gates that would constitute a quantum computer. The scalability of this scheme depends critically on efficient inter-gate electron transfer. This dissertation starts by presenting Shor's prime factorization algorithm as a motivation for quantum computing, justifying the use of electron spins on liquid helium as qubits and explaining the inner-workings of this type of quantum computer. But the essence of this work is experimental. Our setup had to be built from scratch. We then measured the inter-gate charge transfer efficiency (CTE) on thick (∼ 0.9 mm) helium and on helium in shallow (∼ 3 µm deep) channels. On thick helium, at low frequencies, we measured a CTE of 0.9990 (at a density of 4 electrons/µm2) that was governed by the diffusion of electrons through our millimeter-size CCD gates. In channels (12 × 10 µm gates), the CTE was found to be 0.99999992 ±6 × 10-8 for about one electron per gate and probably limited by shallow fabrication-related potential traps. This ability to reliably clock few charges for long distances is an important step towards a proof of the scalability of electron spins on helium as a quantum computing scheme.