Science Daily March 19, 2019
Researchers in the UK used the dimension witnessing approach to show that in program making use of the permitted ‘single qubit’ instructions, unwanted states were being accessed in the transmon circuit components. Their quantum computer program detects the presence of ‘leakage’, where information being processed by a quantum computer escapes from the states of 0 and 1. Most quantum computing hardware platforms suffer from this issue. They verified experimental data from its application on a publicly accessible machine, which shows that undesirable states are affecting certain computations. Even a miniscule leakage accumulating over many millions of hardware components can cause miscalculations and potentially serious errors, nullifying any quantum advantage over conventional computers. The research findings help computer engineers to build systems that mitigate against it and programmers can develop new error-correction techniques to take account of it… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE