By Hira Mushtaq
Publication Date: 2026-09-22 16:00:00
Reliable results from noisy quantum computers can require thousands of repeated circuit runs.
In a study posted Sept. 16, IBM researchers reported reducing that sampling overhead by as much as 63-fold by combining error detection with probabilistic error cancellation, or PEC, on the company’s ibm_aachen superconducting processor.
The result could make some calculations less resource-intensive on existing quantum hardware. IBM also frames the experiment as evidence that techniques associated with error mitigation and correction can work together before fully fault-tolerant quantum computers arrive.
What the Study Found
IBM researchers Laurin Fischer, Ali Javadi-Abhari, Simon Martiel, and Alireza Seif combined two existing techniques. Error detection flags and discards results with identifiable faults, and probabilistic error cancellation, or PEC, corrects for the errors that remain. They call the combined method spacetime PEC, as it models faults by both their location and…
