At this week’s Quantum World Congress, Microsoft made three announcement on advancements and developments in their quantum program.
The first is continued advancement in its error correction research in partnership with Quantinuum. In April, we reported that this team has created a circuit that creates four logical qubits from 30 physical qubits on Quantinuum’s H2 processor. Now they have implemented a [16,4,4] tesseract code that is more efficient an can encode four logical qubits with only 16 physical qubits. They have leveraged this code to demonstrate three different circuits that implement 4 logical qubits on Quantinuum’s 20 qubit H1 processor and 8 and 12 logical qubits on Quantinuum’s 56 qubit H2 processor. When implementing these codes, they were able to achieve circuit error rate improvements of between 11 to 22 times over a corresponding physical error rate for the circuit.
This demonstration goes farther than some of the other error correction code experiments we have seen because the team was also able to implement five rounds of logic gates with these circuits. Other experiments have shown error correction to create logical qubits, but not subjecting those logical qubits to gate operations. A table that compares the Baseline error rate, the Encoded error rate, and the Gain for each of the three configurations is shown below.
Another demonstration that Microsoft has performed with Quantinuum is to complete a full end-to-end hybrid classical/quantum chemical simulation to estimate a ground state energy that combines HPC, AI, and quantum processing. The quantum portion of the circuit used a [[4,2,2]] error detection code that utilized four physical qubits to create two logical qubits. Although the number of qubits in this demonstration is small, Microsoft sees this architecture as a prototype that that will be scaled up to ultimately achieve what they call a Quantum Supercomputer that can perform computation chemistry calculations. They believe that such calculations will be one of the first uses cases to provide quantum advantage in a production setting. A simplified diagram of the data flow is shown below and a blog from Microsoft describing this demonstration has been posted on their website here.
As a third announcement, Microsoft has announced a new partnership with Atom Computing. We had previously reported on Atom’s development of a 1180 qubits on a 1225 site (35 x 35) array using neutral atoms. This new project will use that technology and combine it with Microsoft’s qubit virtualization technology and use error correction to create a system that will offer more than 50 logical qubits. A goal of this project is to create the world’s most power quantum computer, at least for the near term, and provide a system that would be one of the first to demonstrate a scientific quantum advantage. Although more detailed specifications of the intended system or the expected release date are not yet available, we do expect an initial system system to be made available to be available within the next year.
For additional information, you can view blogs posted on the Microsoft website here and here. In addition, Atom Computing has posted a blog about their work with Microsoft here and a technical paper titled Demonstration of quantum computation and error correction with a tesseract code that has been posted on arXiv and available here.
September 10, 2024
