Logical Qubits Outperform Physical Qubits

Quantinuum Approaches Break-Even on quantum error correction

Quantinuum has announced that they have successfully entangled logical qubits in a fault-tolerant circuit using real-time quantum error correction. The company says this is the “...first experimental comparison study of different quantum error correction codes in similar environments and it presents a collection of several different experiments.”

The milestones claimed for this research include:

1. The first demonstration of entangling gates between two logical qubits done in a fully fault-tolerant manner using real-time error correction

2. The first demonstration of a logical entangling circuit that has higher fidelity than the corresponding physical circuit.

According to Quantinuum theory and architecture technical manager David Hayes, ““People have worked with error corrected qubits before, but they haven't reached this sort of special point where the encoded operation is working better than the primitive operation,” Hayes said. “The other thing that's new here is that in other experiments we're doing the error correction while we're doing the operations. An important next step for us is to get the error rate induced by the error correction itself down further."

For more information, see the press release at the Quantinuum website.