Microsoft says it has figured out how to improve error rates in quantum computing, bringing quantum computing closer to a commercial state.
The company worked in collaboration with quantum computing hardware maker Quantinuum to improve the performance of the qubit, the basic unit of quantum computing. Qubits work by maintaining two different phases at once (instead of just one and zero, it’s both), but they are not very stable, which makes it easy for them to lose data. Researchers can now create multiple “logical qubits,” or qubits that are more stable while maintaining these different states.
Krysta Svore, vice president of advanced quantum development at Microsoft, said The edge in an interview that because qubits are error-prone, researchers needed to find a way to stabilize them.
“We need reliable quantum computing, and not just in theory; We need to show that it can work in practice,” says Svore. “I like to think of it as putting noise-canceling headphones on qubits.”
She says these more reliable qubits help quantum computing “graduate” from level one, the most fundamental level with error-prone and generally called noisy qubits, to the next level, where scientists can run more calculations correctly and scale up. . technology for more commercial use.
Other quantum computing experts welcomed the progress by Microsoft and Quantinuum. Henry Yuen, associate professor of computer science at Columbia and theoretical computer scientist, says the edge via email This may be just the beginning of more discoveries that facilitate quantum computing.
“We are far from the final destination, but signs are becoming more frequent that some important milestones will occur soon,” says Yuen. “I’m sure there will be bigger and better demonstrations of quantum fault tolerance soon.”
Microsoft brought its qubit virtualization system, which Svore says “abstracts” groups of physical qubits, to Quantiuum’s quantum computer to create virtual logical qubits.
With it, users could create qubits with higher fault tolerance or time without encountering an error. The team created four reliable logical qubits from just 30 physical qubits. Previously, the scientific consensus was that hundreds of physical qubits were needed to create a pair of non-failing logical qubits, which would have taken decades to create.
The teams performed 14,000 calculations without losing the quantum state and found that they improved the error rate by a factor of 800 over physical qubits. Svore says the system could detect and correct errors without destroying the logical qubit and keep the chain of calculations going.
Microsoft is now figuring out how to bring this capability to Azure Quantum Elements, its platform for scientists to use AI, high-performance computing, and quantum computing to run scientific experiments.
Yuen says that while he believes the term “quantum virtualization” may be Microsoft’s branding for error-correcting code, his findings could be scalable for other quantum computing companies to try on their own.
Quantum computing has always seemed like an innovation from the distant future, even though the idea and experimentation has been around for decades. Companies like IBM, Microsoft and Google have been trying for years to make quantum computing reliable, secure, profitable and, most importantly, useful.
Quantinuum Chief Product Officer Ilyas Khan and Senior Director of Offer Management Jenni Strabley said in a blog post that they plan to continue improving the system to create more reliable logical qubits.
“In the near term, with a hybrid supercomputer powered by one hundred reliable logical qubits, we believe that organizations will be able to begin to see scientific advantages and will be able to accelerate valuable advances towards some of the most important problems facing humanity, such as how to model the materials used. in batteries and hydrogen fuel cells or accelerate the development of meaning-aware AI language models,” Quantinuum said in its post.
Now, with the work of Microsoft and Quantiuum, it is up to others to see if they can replicate the same.
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