Honeywell, Google Bring Practical Quantum Computers a Big Step Closer

upstart writes:

Honeywell, Google bring practical quantum computers a big step closer:

In a research paper released Wednesday, Honeywell said it had ganged together multiple physical qubits -- the storage and processing units of quantum computers -- so that they could withstand disturbances from outside forces like vibration and electromagnetic emissions.

The results arrived one week after Google published a paper in Nature Communications also showing logical qubits overpowering errors. Google's approach, however, didn't achieve full error correction: its method only could handle one of two error types at a time instead of both simultaneously, and it couldn't fix errors it detected. That's why Honeywell is claiming its full error correction achievement as a first.

"Big enterprise-level problems require precision and error-corrected logical qubits to scale successfully," said Tony Uttley, Honeywell Quantum Solutions' president, in a statement.

[...] Honeywell demonstrated its technique on its 10-qubit H1 quantum computer. Seven of the qubits stored data while the remaining three "ancilla" qubits shepherded the error correction process, which is governed by a conventional computer that steers qubits back on track when a problem is detected.

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