By Shy Cohen, Megan Schumann
Publication Date: 2026-10-19 18:07:00
- Adaptive circuits on an IBM processor controlled a system of up to 100 physical qubits through repeated measurements and conditional resets.
- Changing the balance between scrambling and resetting revealed a transition near an equal probability of the two operations.
- The experiment demonstrated capabilities relevant to future error correction, but did not protect a logical qubit or deliver fault-tolerant computation.
A quantum processor can do more than execute a fixed sequence and reveal its answer at the end. It can measure selected qubits while a circuit is running, use the result to choose an action and continue. Repeating that cycle across a large system is an important challenge for quantum hardware.
An experiment involving Rutgers University, IBM and collaborators has now used that capability to steer up to 100 qubits from scrambling toward an orderly state. Published in Nature Physics, the study tested how competing quantum operations produce a collective transition between…
