In a paper published on February 22 in the journal Nature, researchers at Google Quantum AI say they have achieved a major milestone in eliminating errors in quantum computing simply by increasing the number of qubits.
Basic units of information in conventional computers are called “bits” and are stored as a sequence of ones and zeros. In a quantum computer system, these units are known as qubits, which can be both ones and zeros at the same time. In theory, this gives quantum machines much more computing power than conventional computers. That is, quantum computers will be able to quickly perform tasks that even the most powerful machines today would take years to complete.
However, progress towards commercially viable quantum machines has been slow. This is because the ability to transmit information in quantum computers is fragile, and environmental disturbances such as temperature and defects in materials can lead to errors. Eliminating such errors is one of the main tasks of using the capabilities of quantum computing.
Using Google’s Sycamore quantum chip, the researchers studied two different sizes of logic qubits, one with 17 qubits and the other with 49. The researchers found that the larger logic qubit had a lower error rate of about 2.9% per round of error correction , while the smaller one had a frequency of about 3%.
“Instead of working with physical qubits on our quantum processor one by one, we treat a group of them as one logical qubit. For the first time, our researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to reduce the number of errors by increasing the number of qubits. Our breakthrough is a significant shift in the way we work with quantum computers,” wrote Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet.
The new achievement doesn’t mean researchers are ready to build a fully error-correcting quantum computer, but it does demonstrate that it is indeed possible; that error correction works in principle,” physicist Julian Kelly of Google Quantum AI said at the briefing.
IBM has launched Osprey – its most powerful quantum computer at 433 cubic meters.
Source: Sciencenews
