Suppressing quantum errors by scaling a surface code logical qubit

Research scientist Kevin Satzinger explains the main results from our recent paper on quantum error correction.

Practical quantum computing will require error rates that are well below what is achievable with physical qubits. Quantum error correction offers a path to algorithmically-relevant error rates by encoding logical qubits within many physical qubits. However, introducing more qubits also increases the number of error sources, so the density of errors must be sufficiently low in order for logical performance to improve with increasing code size. Here, we report the measurement of logical qubit performance scaling across multiple code sizes, and demonstrate that our system of superconducting qubits has sufficient performance to overcome the additional errors from increasing qubit number. These results mark the first experimental demonstration where quantum error correction begins to improve performance with increasing qubit number, illuminating the path to reaching the logical error rates required for computation.

Watch more Quantum Summer Symposium 2022 sessions → https://goo.gle/QSS22
Subscribe to Google Quantum AI → https://goo.gle/QuantumAI

#QSS22