Scientists established within the Nineties that a few of a quantum laptop’s qubits may very well be devoted to correcting these errors, and the years since then have been spent looking for methods to assemble bodily qubits in order that sufficient “logical” qubits are left over to do helpful computing work.
The usual business considering has been {that a} chip will want about 1,000,000 bodily qubits to yield a helpful variety of logical qubits.
However AWS mentioned it had constructed a prototype chip that makes use of solely 9 bodily qubits to yield one working logical qubit, due to using what is called a “cat” qubit, so named for physicist Erwin Schrodinger’s well-known thought experiment as an instance ideas of quantum mechanics during which an unfortunate cat in a field is each useless and alive on the identical time.
Oskar Painter, AWS director of quantum {hardware}, mentioned the AWS method may in the future yield helpful computer systems with solely 100,000 qubits slightly than 1,000,000.
“It ought to enable us to offer between 5 and 10 occasions decrease numbers of bodily qubits to implement the error correction in a totally scaled machine. In order that’s the actual profit,” Painter informed Reuters.
Painter mentioned that the present chip was constructed utilizing commonplace strategies borrowed from the chip business and a fabric known as tantalum, however that AWS and companions hope to customize these strategies additional.
“That is the place I feel there’s going to be an enormous quantity of innovation and that would be the factor that might actually reel in timelines for improvement. If we make enhancements on the supplies and processing stage, it will make the underlying expertise simply a lot easier,” Painter mentioned.
