Microsoft and Quantinuum announce a new milestone in making a reliable quantum computer

In June 2023, Microsoft unveiled its own roadmap, which it claimed would serve as a blueprint in its pursuit of creating a dependable quantum supercomputer. Presently, the company has announced a new advancement towards achieving this objective, in collaboration with its hardware partner, Quantinuum.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced that it had utilized its own qubit-virtualization system in conjunction with Quantinuum’s ion-trap hardware. This collaboration enabled them to perform more than 14,000 experiments without encountering any errors. As a result, Microsoft and Quantinuum successfully developed dependable logical qubits with an error rate that was 800 times superior to that of physical qubits.

According to Microsoft, this new initiative signifies a progression in quantum computing beyond the initial Foundation Level 1, which relies on physical qubits. The company now asserts that it has advanced to the Resilient Level 2, enabling these machines to operate using dependable logical qubits.

Microsoft included:

Our qubit-virtualization system, which filters and corrects errors, combined with Quantinuum’s hardware demonstrates the largest gap between physical and logical error rates reported to date. This is the first demonstrated system with four logical qubits that improves the logical over the physical error rate by such a large order of magnitude.

According to Microsoft, the logical qubits and their capabilities will soon be accessible to subscribers of the company’s Azure Quantum Elements services. Further technical details about this groundbreaking achievement can be found in the Microsoft Azure Quantum Blog.

According to Microsoft, its goal for its quantum computing efforts is to reach Level 3. At this stage, quantum computers will have the capability to solve intricate tasks and challenges that are currently beyond the capabilities of traditional supercomputers. In an interview with TechCrunch back in June 2023, Microsoft stated its ambition to develop a fully functional quantum computer within the next ten years.