New Strides in Quantum Error Correction

There has been a very interesting and exciting development in QC recently, with the publication of a paper that some of you were discussing over in academic-papers, regarding fault-tolerance and error correction in quantum computing operations.

Qubits, which are the basis of quantum computers, are fickle and prone to error when stacked together. This error can rise from various sources, such as quantum decoherence, crosstalk and issues with calibration.

Quantum decoherence being the loss of a definite phase relation between different quantum states. This phase relation allows the mathematical computations behind quantum computations, so it’s loss leads to unexpected events(errors) occurring in qubit-run programs.

A solution to this problem lies in the idea of the error corrected Quantum Computer, which would rely on logical, rather than physical qubits and suppressing errors in the physical qubits below a threshold using parity checks, which would exponentially suppress logical error rates. This is achievable by increasing the number of redundant physical qubits encoding data past just one iteration. A major step towards this has been the development of superconducting transmons. There is hope that this will allow quantum computers to simultaneously compute information as well as protect it from errors at the same time, as opposed to just encoding it.

You can read more about this at: https://scitechdaily.com/important-milestone-reached-in-quantum-computing-with-error-correction/ https://phys.org/news/2021-12-team-important-quantum-error.html

The paper can be found at:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-021-01423-9