Quantum chip reduces errors to five in a million
Quantinuum researchers demonstrated a quantum computer that glitches only five times out of a million operations.
Scientists report these results in a document uploaded October 19 to the firm site and arXiv.org. The device known as Helios uses electrically charged atoms hovering over a chip to function as qubits for calculations. Those atoms are delicate and can flip unintentionally, causing errors that mess up the entire process.
A method known as error correction handles this by merging many faulty qubits into a single logical unit. This new unit is less prone to mistakes because it integrates a specific count of physical qubits together. Every time the logical qubit grows larger, the mistake frequency decreases by a factor named lambda.
Quantinuum has achieved a lambda of about 10, meaning mistakes fell fast when creating bigger logical qubits. One logical qubit made of 37 physical qubits showed just 5 mistakes in a million trials. Yet, that test involved only one logical qubit instead of a full system.
Getting to the megaquop regime might require around 50 to 100 logical qubits to handle reliable tasks. The high lambda value means hitting a target error rate needs fewer physical qubits overall. This creates a huge savings in the total number of qubits needed for future machines.