In a recent announcement, Microsoft and Quantinuum highlighted a significant achievement in quantum computing, demonstrating the most reliable logical qubits on record. They achieved an error rate 800 times better than previous physical qubits. Microsoft’s qubit-virtualization system, which filters and corrects errors, combined with Quantinuum’s hardware demonstrates the largest gap between physical and logical error rates reported to date. This is the first demonstrated system with four logical qubits that improves the logical over the physical error rate by such a large order of magnitude. This breakthrough ran over 14,000 experiments without a single error.
The whole of quantum computing ecosystem has recently been focused on the critical task of improving qubit fidelity and enabling fault-tolerant systems in order to move the quantum computing from scientific experimentation to delivering large scale scientific and commerical benefits, i.e. achieve quantum supremacy. Transitioning to robust logical qubits, formed by combining multiple physical qubits, and adding smart, co-designed software for error-handling is the approach the community is chasing. Microsoft seems to have done exactly that, finally marking a transition from NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era to more advanced, resilient quantum computing that will, once it further scales up, lead to solving practical, real-world problems; in other words, to Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing (FTQC) era. (The Official Microsoft Blog)
