Researchers from the University of Sydney, in collaboration with IBM, reported a significant improvement in the survival rate of logical qubits to 96% using a new error correction mechanism.
The main obstacle to creating stable machines for the new era of FTQC, according to scientists, is the “idle noise” that occurs during intermediate measurements of qubits in the computation cycle.
In current quantum devices, the system must regularly perform internal checks for error correction. However, during these pauses, other components of the processor lose stability, leading to new failures.
To address this issue, physicists completely redesigned the error correction architecture, drastically reducing computation downtime. The new method was tested on the advanced 156-qubit superconducting quantum processor IBM Quantum Heron r2. Thanks to algorithm optimization, the logical qubit survival rate per error correction cycle was increased from less than 90% to 96%.
Project leader and Sydney Nano director Stephen Bartlett emphasized that this process occurs repeatedly at each computation stage, and the forced downtime of other elements becomes a “serious obstacle” to reliable operation.
Although the result was achieved under laboratory conditions on a single processor, research in this direction is critically important for the industry. Scalability and fault tolerance remain the main barriers to quantum computing.
In June, corporations made advances in quantum error correction.
Previously, IBM planned to achieve the first confirmed cases of quantum advantage by the end of 2026.
