Phys.org September 1, 2022
The fundamental challenge to quantum computers is that the operations are noisy. Rather than focusing solely on reducing the number of errors a team of researchers in the US (Yale University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Princeton) made errors more visible. They delved deeply into the actual physical causes of error and engineered their system so that the most common source of error effectively eliminates, rather than simply corrupting, the damaged data leading to “erasure error,” which is fundamentally easier to weed out than data that is corrupted but still looks like all the other data. Erasure errors are well understood in conventional computing, but researchers had not previously considered trying to engineer quantum computers to convert errors into erasures. Their proposed system could withstand an error rate of 4.1%, which is well within the realm of possibility for current quantum computers. They proposed a qubit encoding and gate protocol for 171Yb neutral atom qubits that converts the dominant physical errors into erasures. They estimated that 98% of errors can be converted into erasures. There was a threshold increase from 0.937% to 4.15%, and faster decrease in the logical error rate for the same number of physical qubits. According to the researchers erasure conversion should benefit any error correcting code and may also be applied to design new gates and encodings in other qubit platforms…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Overview of a fault-tolerant neutral atom quantum computer using erasure conversion. Credit: Nature Communications volume 13, Article number: 4657 (2022)Â