Physicists Perform “Quantum Surgery” To Fix Errors While Computing

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Physicists Perform “Quantum Surgery” To Fix Errors While Computing

Quantum computers promise powerful new capabilities, but their sensitivity to errors remains a major obstacle. Researchers have now demonstrated a method for performing quantum operations on protected logical qubits while continuously correcting errors, even during the operation itself. Credit: SciTechDaily.com

By combining surface codes with lattice surgery, researchers have shown how logical qubits can be manipulated and entangled while remaining protected from errors.Quantum computers are often described as a glimpse of a faster, more powerful future. The catch is that today’s devices are fragile in a way ordinary computers are not. Their biggest headache is decoherence, the gradual loss of the delicate quantum behavior that makes them useful in the first place. When decoherence sets in, it can trigger two common kinds of mistakes: bit flips and phase flips.
A bit flip is the more intuitive problem. A qubit that should represent ‘0’ can unexpectedly behave like ‘1’. A phase flip is stranger but just as damaging. Even if a qubit stays in a superposition, the relationship between its components can suddenly switch, turning a positive phase into a negative one and scrambling the computation.
One promising workaround is to avoid relying on any single physical qubit. Instead, researchers spread one logical qubit across many physical qubits and run error correction routines repeatedly. The idea is to keep the information stable long enough to matter. But storage is only the beginning. A quantum computer has to perform actions on that protected information, especially quantum gates, which are the basic steps used to build quantum algorithms.

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