Quantinuum reports five errors per million operations on one logical qubit

Quantinuum researchers reported five errors in a million operations on a single logical qubit built from 37 physical qubits, Science News reported. Their paper, posted October 19 on the company's website and arXiv, describes experiments on the 98-qubit Helios ion-based quantum computer. Quantum error correction combines physical qubits into a logical qubit that is less prone to mistakes. Errors fell by a factor of about 10 as the researchers increased logical-qubit size, compared with about 2 in a previous Google demonstration. Lower error rates could reduce the physical qubits needed for reliable calculations, but the experiment used only one logical qubit; a million-reliable-operation machine could possibly require around 50 to 100.