Has a second-level quantum computer been created? The number of errors generated has been significantly reduced

One of the biggest problems that developers of quantum computers have to face is the huge number of errors that these devices generate during calculations. In the average quantum machine, the error rate is 1:1000 (10^-3). In some computers, the ratio reaches 1:100, and the best error rate is 1:10,000 (10^-4). This is definitely too much. Many experts believe that we will be able to talk about a useful quantum computer when the error rate drops to 10^-12. The error rate in classical computers is 10^-18.

One company that has long been working on solving the error problem in quantum computers is Microsoft. Among the solutions proposed by local experts is to create a smaller number of logical qubits than a larger number of physical qubits. This creates a virtual quantum bit system.

Shared on arXiv conditionWhich describes the implications of the collaboration between Quantinuum and Microsoft engineers. Quantinuum provided the H2 quantum computer, which uses ion qubits, while Microsoft's contribution is qubit virtualization software. The tests used 30 of the 32 physical qubits available on H2 and 4 logical qubits were created. The whole thing was tested by running 14,000 experiments. It turned out that all of them came out flawlessly, and no errors were detected. Subsequent tests showed that the error rate generated by the system was 1:100,000 (10^-5), so it's 800 times lower than the H2 running without Microsoft software.

The authors of the experiment claim to have created a second-level quantum computer, that is, one with a relatively low error rate and the ability to scale up the work and improve its quality.

Has a second-level quantum computer been created? The number of errors generated has been significantly reduced