DTN 091: Google's Quantum Computing Breakthrough

“This computational alchemy has its limits. If the physical qubits are too failure-prone, error correction is counterproductive — adding more physical qubits will make the logical qubits worse, not better. But if the error rate goes below a specific threshold, the balance tips: The more physical qubits you add, the more resilient each logical qubit becomes.

Now, in a paper published today in Nature, Newman and his colleagues at Google Quantum AI have finally crossed the threshold. They transformed a group of physical qubits into a single logical qubit, then showed that as they added more physical qubits to the group, the logical qubit’s error rate dropped sharply.”