Microsoft and Quantinuum have improved the logical error rate in quantum computing by 800x, a breakthrough the partners say has the potential to usher in a new era of qubit processing. Using ion-trap hardware from Quantinuum and a qubit-virtualization system from Microsoft, the team ran more than 14,000 experiments with no errors — a huge feat in the notoriously fickle realm of qubits. The system has error diagnostics and corrections built in, identifying which errors need to be fixed and correcting them without destroying the underlying logical qubits, according to the companies.

Microsoft explains in a post on its cloud blog that the sophisticated new approach produces the most reliable logical qubits to date.

IEEE Spectrum also contextualizes the achievement by writing that error-prone qubits, the processing unit of quantum computers, have led to “what’s called fault-tolerant quantum computing,” which could require “1,000 or more of such iffy ‘physical’ qubits to yield just one potentially useful ‘logical’ qubit.”

“With our qubit-virtualization system, we were able to create four highly reliable logical qubits from only 30 physical qubits of the available 32 on Quantinuum’s machine,” Microsoft writes. Quantinuum’s 32-qubit System Model H2 quantum processor is powered by Honeywell.

“When entangled, these logical qubits exhibited a circuit error rate of 10-5 or 0.00001, which means they would experience an error only once in every 100,000 runs,” translating to “an 800x improvement over the circuit error rate of 8×10-3 or 0.008, measured from entangled physical qubits.”

The result was achieved through a combination of advanced runtime error diagnostics with computational run rejection and error correction. The results are detailed in a scientific research paper.

The team claims the breakthrough “has now moved state-of-the-art of quantum computing out of what has typically been dubbed the era of noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computers,” writes TechCrunch.

Quantum computing has generally been considered “‘noisy” because even the smallest changes in the environment can lead a quantum system to essentially become random (or ‘decohere’), and ‘intermediate scale’ because the current generation of quantum computers is still limited to just over a thousand qubits at best.’”

SiliconANGLE provides a bit of background on quantum computing, writing that it “uses qubits to store and process information. Unlike a classical bit that is a 1 or a 0, a qubit can also exist in a superposition where its state is indeterminate — has a probability of being a 1 or a 0 — or entangled with another qubit,” and noting that “because of the hardware that qubits are built on, which is often sensitive superconducting circuitry to resolve the measurements, qubits can be extremely error-prone.”

In a separate blog post, Microsoft calls the development “a crucial milestone on our path to building a hybrid supercomputing system” that can have potentially huge impact on research and innovation across industries. The system leverages “the best of AI, supercomputing, and quantum capabilities,” per the post.