Research teams from the University of Innsbruck, RWTH Aachen University and the Forschungszentrum Jülich have discovered a way to protect quantum computers’ computational operations from errors.
In regular computers, redundancy data used in operations helps avoid mistakes. However, due to differences in nature, quantum computers just make copies of the data they work with.
Researchers decided to distribute logical quantum information into several qubits – the analogue of bits for quantum computers. For the first time in history, research teams implemented a system that runs operations on two logical quantum bits instead of one, thus making these computations fault-proof.
The experiment was run on a small ion-trap quantum computer working on a mere 16 trapped atoms, with each qubit taking up seven out of them. However, researchers believe it can be extrapolated onto bigger systems with the computer still able to catch errors using the two quantum bits system.
Naturally, such a solution came at a cost of computational power, but even then quantum computers easily surpass regular ones in complicated and precision-demanding operations.
"The fault-tolerant implementation requires more operations than non-fault-tolerant operations. The effort and complexity increase, but the resulting quality is better", Thomas Monz, lead of the research teams, said.
Scientists’ next step is to transfer the technology to a bigger machine and test it in more complicated calculations.
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