By South China Morning Post
Publication Date: 2025-12-26 01:00:00
Chinese researchers have taken a major step in the global race to build practical quantum computers, becoming the first team outside the United States – and the second in the world after Google – to cross a key threshold that determines whether these machines can work reliably at scale.
A team led by Pan Jianwei at the University of Science and Technology of China said their superconducting quantum computer, Zuchongzhi 3.2, had reached the fault-tolerant threshold – a point where fixing errors made the system more stable rather than less, overcoming a long-standing problem in which the very process of error correction introduces new mistakes.
Their research, published last week in the journal Physical Review Letters, relied on microwave-based control rather than the hardware-intensive error-suppression methods used by Google. The Chinese approach “could offer a more efficient route than Google’s” to building large, fault-tolerant quantum computers, the team said in a…
