{"id":102856,"date":"2025-08-28T21:32:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T21:32:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/102856\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T21:32:06","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T21:32:06","slug":"how-to-build-larger-more-reliable-quantum-computers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/102856\/","title":{"rendered":"How to build larger, more reliable quantum computers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cOur work isn\u2019t about inventing a new chip,\u201d said Mohamed A. Shalby<\/a>, the first author of the paper and a doctoral candidate in the UCR Department of Physics and Astronomy<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s about showing that the chips we already have can be connected to create something much larger and still work. That\u2019s a foundational shift in how we build quantum systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scaling refers to handling increasing amounts of data without performance failure. Fault tolerance means a quantum system can detect and correct errors automatically, giving reliable outputs even with imperfect hardware.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn practice, connecting multiple smaller chips has been difficult,\u201d Shalby said. \u201cConnections between separate chips \u2014 especially those housed in separate cryogenic refrigerators \u2014 are much noisier than operations within a single chip. This increased noise can overwhelm the system and prevent error correction from working properly.\u201d<\/p>\n

The UCR-led team found, however, that even when the links between chips were up to 10 times noisier than the chips themselves, the system still managed to detect and correct errors.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis means we don\u2019t have to wait for perfect hardware to scale quantum computers,\u201d Shalby said. \u201cWe now know that as long as each chip is operating with high fidelity, the links between them can be \u2018good enough\u2019 \u2014 not perfect \u2014 and we can still build a fault-tolerant system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shalby explained that in quantum computing, where a qubit is the basic unit of information, achieving reliable performance requires more than just building a few qubits. Today, individual \u201clogical\u201d qubits must be built out of clusters of many physical qubits, often hundreds or thousands, he said. This redundancy helps correct errors that naturally arise in fragile quantum systems.<\/p>\n

According to Shalby, the most widely used error correction technique is called the surface code, and a \u201csurface code chip\u201d is a quantum processor designed around this method. He said such chips can encode high-fidelity logical qubits by managing and correcting the errors within their own architecture.<\/p>\n

The team\u2019s discovery is based on thousands of simulations across multiple architectures and connection methods. The researchers tested six different modular designs under varying levels of error and noise, using realistic parameters inspired by Google\u2019s existing quantum infrastructure.<\/p>\n

\u201cUntil now, most quantum milestones focused on increasing the sheer number of qubits,\u201d Shalby said. \u201cBut without fault tolerance, those qubits aren\u2019t useful. Our work shows we can build systems that are both scalable and reliable \u2014 now, not years from now.\u201d<\/p>\n

This research, motivated by published work done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology<\/a>, was supported by the National Science Foundation. The simulations were conducted using tools developed by the Google Quantum AI team.<\/p>\n

Shalby was joined in the research by Leonid P. Pryadko<\/a> and Renyu Wang<\/a> at UCR, as well as Denis Sedov at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.<\/p>\n

The title of the paper<\/a> is \u201cOptimized noise-resilient surface code teleportation interfaces.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cOur work isn\u2019t about inventing a new chip,\u201d said Mohamed A. Shalby, the first author of the paper…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102857,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[64,63,257,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-102856","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-computing","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}