Experimental investigation of an eight-qubit unit cell in a superconducting optimization processor

Anyone who follows this blog and wants to get a real in-depth insight into the way that D-Wave's processors are built, and how they solve problems, should definitely read this paper:Phys. Rev. B. 82, 024511 (2010), R. Harris et al.The paper itself is quite long (15 pages) but it really gives a great description of how an 8-qubit 'portion' of the processor is designed, fabricated, fit to a physical (quantum mechanical) model, calibrated, and then used to solve problems.If you don't have access to the Phys Rev B journal, you can read a free preprint of the article here. And if you've never tried reading a journal paper before, why not give it a go! (This is an experimental paper, which means there are lots of pretty pictures to look at, even if the Physics gets hard to follow). For example, a microphotograph of the 8-qubit cell: