Microsoft And Quantinuum Report on Major Gains in Quantum Error Correction

Insider Brief

• A Nature study from Microsoft Quantum and Quantinuum found that quantum error-correction techniques reduced computational errors by factors ranging from 11-fold to 800-fold compared with equivalent calculations performed directly on physical qubits.
• Using two error-correction approaches known as the carbon code and tesseract code, the researchers demonstrated repeated mid-computation error correction and lower logical error rates across experiments involving up to 12 logical qubits.
• The researchers said the results suggest that current quantum processors can already benefit from fault tolerance, although further advances in hardware, real-time decoding and scalable error-correction methods will be needed before practical large-scale quantum computers become a reality.

Quantum computers have long promised to solve problems beyond the reach of conventional machines. Yet the field has faced a persistent obstacle. The quantum bits, or qubits,…