Quantum computers, like other electronics, are prone to making errors. However, although redundancies could readily solve the problem in ordinary computers, quantum machines were unable to do so.
Researchers from the University of Innsbruck, RWTH Aachen University, and Forschungszentrum Jülich have devised a method for preventing errors in the computing processes of quantum computers.
In regular computers, data that is used more than once helps keep mistakes from happening. Quantum computers, on the other hand, make duplicates of the data they work with due to differences in nature.
Researchers opted to split logical quantum information into numerous qubits, which are quantum computers’ analogues to bits. For the first time in history, researchers developed a device that performs operations on two logical quantum bits rather of one, making computations fault-proof.
The experiment was carried out using a modest ion-trap quantum computer with only 16 trapped atoms, seven of which were used for each qubit. Researchers believe that it can be stretched to larger systems while still allowing the computer to detect faults using the two quantum bits technique.
Naturally, such a solution came at the expense of computational capacity, but quantum computers nevertheless readily outperform ordinary computers in complex and precision-demanding procedures.
“The fault-tolerant implementation,” according to Thomas Monz, the head of the research teams, “requires more operations than non-fault-tolerant operations. The effort and complexity increase, but the resulting quality is better. “
The scientists’ next step is to scale up the technique and put it to the test in more complex calculations.
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