Phys.org October 11, 2023
For eventual application in quantum error correction, it is advantageous to realize qubits with structured error models, such as biased Pauli errors or conversion of errors into detectable erasures. An international team of researchers (USA – Princeton University, Yale University, France) demonstrated a new neutral atom qubit using the nuclear spin of a long-lived metastable state in 171Yb. The long coherence time and fast excitation to the Rydberg state allowed one- and two-qubit gates with fidelities of 0.9990(1) and 0.980(1), respectively. A large fraction of all gate errors results in decays out of the qubit subspace to the ground state. By performing fast, mid-circuit detection of these errors, they converted them into erasure errors; during detection, the induced error probability on qubits remaining in the computational space was less than 10−5. According to the researchers their work has established metastable 171Yb as a promising platform for realizing fault-tolerant quantum computing… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Metastable 171Yb qubit. Credit: Nature volume 622, pages279–284 (2023)Â