Alternate qubit design does error correction in {hardware}

Enlarge (credit score: Nord Quantique)

There is a normal consensus that performing any form of advanced algorithm on quantum {hardware} must anticipate the arrival of error-corrected qubits. Particular person qubits are too error-prone to be trusted for advanced calculations, so quantum data will should be distributed throughout a number of qubits, permitting monitoring for errors and intervention after they happen.

However most methods of creating these “logical qubits” wanted for error correction require wherever from dozens to over 100 particular person {hardware} qubits. This implies we’ll want wherever from tens of hundreds to thousands and thousands of {hardware} qubits to do calculations. Current {hardware} has solely cleared the 1,000-qubit mark throughout the final month, in order that future seems to be a number of years off at finest.

However on Thursday, an organization known as Nord Quantique introduced that it had demonstrated error correction utilizing a single qubit with a definite {hardware} design. Whereas this has the potential to vastly scale back the variety of {hardware} qubits wanted for helpful error correction, the demonstration concerned a single qubit—the corporate would not even count on to reveal operations on pairs of qubits till later this yr.