(The Harry Potter villain kept his soul safe by concealing it in multiple objects called Horcruxes.) “If a piece of it goes missing, you can reconstruct it from the other pieces, like Voldemort,” says quantum physicist David Schuster of the University of Chicago, who was not involved with the new research. That allows researchers to check and fix mistakes in the data. In a logical qubit, information is stored redundantly. But now that scientists have shown that they can keep errors under control, he says, “there’s nothing fundamentally stopping us to build a useful quantum computer.” To do complex calculations, scientists will have to dramatically scale up the number of qubits in the machines. Still, that path remains a long one, Hensinger says. “This is a key demonstration on the path to build a large-scale quantum computer,” says quantum physicist Winfried Hensinger of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, who was not involved in the new study. Scientists used nine qubits to make a single, improved qubit called a logical qubit, which, unlike the individual qubits from which it was made, can be probed to check for mistakes. But without a mechanism for fixing the computers’ mistakes, the answers that a quantum computer spits out could be gobbledygook ( SN: 6/22/20).Ĭombining the power of multiple qubits into one can solve the error woes, researchers report October 4 in Nature. The fragile quantum bits, or qubits, that make up the machines are notoriously error-prone, but now scientists have shown that they can fix the flubs.Ĭomputers that harness the rules of quantum mechanics show promise for making calculations far out of reach for standard computers ( SN: 6/29/17). Mistakes happen - especially in quantum computers.
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