Quantum computing has a crucial weakness that may severely delay, if not kill outright, its chances of becoming a way of running algorithms that classical computers cannot handle: its susceptibility to noise.
Noise is currently quantum computing’s biggest challenge as well as its most significant limitation. IBM is working to reduce that noise in the next few years through various types of quantum error management until true quantum error correction (QEC) is attained..
[R]eluctance to accept that practical quantum computing has arrived presumably stems from the question of whether it can do anything truly useful yet. Sure, one can construct a problem that is very hard for a classical device but ideally suited to a quantum computer and then demonstrate that only a few dozen qubits may be enough to achieve ‘supremacy’. But how helpful is that in the proverbial real world?
Although the word “qudit” might look like a typo, this lesser-known cousin of the qubit, or quantum bit, can carry more information and is more resistant to noise — both of which are key qualities needed to improve the performance of quantum networks, quantum key distribution systems and, eventually, the quantum internet.
Zapata and the University of Hull developed new techniques to extrapolate meaningful data from noisy quantum devices and used it to calculate the ro-vibrational spectrum of hydrogen to obtain results that are comparable with the state-of-the-art classical simulations, as well as the experimental results.
The team, from Japan, succeeded in executing the world’s fastest two-qubit gate using a completely new method of manipulation.
If quantum computers can be made to operate more efficiently, while also eliminating the noise they generate with their answers, it could boost the already fast-moving quantum development timeline.
To start to do anything useful with quantum computers, we need to reach the million-qubit scale. It’s a monumental task but not an impossible one with the right engineering focus to scale to the million-qubit range.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed a new approach to quantum error mitigation that could help make quantum computing’s theoretical potential a reality: noise estimation circuits.
It is well established that quantum error correction can improve the performance of quantum sensors. But new theory work cautions that, unexpectedly, the approach can also give rise to inaccurate and misleading results — and shows how to rectify these shortcomings.
