Check your subscription status, update your details and more. Error-correction record pushes quantum computers closer to usefulness Useful quantum computers will have to use many “logical qubits” as their computational building blocks, and researchers just broke the record for how reliable they can be Another milestone on the way to building useful and practical quantum computers has been passed. Researchers at the firm Quantinuum have used error-correction methods to make their Helios-1 quantum computer store information with an unprecedented degree of reliability, which is a key prerequisite for running complex calculations in the future.
Quantum computers hold immense potential for solving problems and making scientific discoveries that have, so far, been out of reach for even the best supercomputers. But they haven’t yet realised that potential, partly because all existing quantum computers make lots of errors. Consequently, researchers around the world are racing to perfect error-correction methods where a quantum computer’s physical building blocks, or qubits, are encoded into groups called “logical qubits”, which are a lot less likely to make errors when used to run calculations.
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