THE quantum computing race is hotting up. IBM has been working to wipe out errors in quantum hardware, and its efforts have just won a major boost – funding from the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).
Laying out the error-prone qubits on a grid allows them to act as a single, well-behaved unit
Quantum computing is still hampered by the fragility of quantum bits – qubits – which are easily affected by heat and electromagnetic radiation. To stabilise them, IBM is taking qubits made from superconducting chips and laying them out on a grid. This allows the error-prone qubits to act as a single, well-behaved unit, known as a logical qubit.
“What we’ve done thus far is to demonstrate some of the concepts of error correction and detection,” says IBM’s Jerry Chow.
They need about 20 ordinary qubits to create one logical qubit, but packing qubits close together will be tricky. “When you put many of them together, you don’t know that they are going to work the same way as when you just have one,” Chow says.
IBM isn’t alone. Google, too, has hired researchers to develop quantum hardware. “It’s more of a competitive field now,” says Chow.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Cash for qubits”