There have been a lot of announcements made recently about developments in quantum error codes (QEC) research, so it might be worthwhile to review what are the desirable features of a good code:
- Low ratio of physical qubits to logical qubits for efficiency
- Significant improvement in error reduction and ability to scale the level of improvement as the code size increases
- Fast logical cycle time including error decoding and correction to maximize processing speed
- Single shot decoding of the errors to maximize the logical cycle time
- Straight forward implementation for a given hardware architecture
- Efficient methods for implementation of a universal gate set for processing any quantum algorithm
Microsoft has been working on a code of this type aimed for initial implementation on Atom Computer’s forthcoming neutral atom processor. Details of this specific implementation is a [[96,6,8]] code (meaning 96 physical qubits, 6 logical qubits, and code distance of 8). Assuming the physical qubits have an intrinsic 2-qubit error rate of 10-3, the resulting logical qubits would have an error rate of 10-6.
For additional information about this research, you can access a blog post on the Microsoft Quantum webpage here. And for more technical information you can access a paper posted on arXiv last month titled Geometrically Enhanced Topological Quantum Codes available here and a follow-on new paper titled A Topologically Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computer with Four Dimensional Geometric Codes that has just been posted on arXiv.
June 19, 2025
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