Researchers at the University of Oxford have reported a new benchmark for single-qubit gate fidelity using trapped-ion technology, achieving an error rate of just 0.000015%—equivalent to one error in 6.7 million operations. The result is scheduled for publication in Physical Review Letters and represents an order-of-magnitude improvement over the group’s own prior record set in 2014. The experiment used calcium ions manipulated by microwave signals, rather than conventional laser control, enabling enhanced operational stability and simplified integration.
The system was operated at room temperature and without magnetic shielding, reducing the engineering overhead typically associated with trapped-ion platforms. The use of microwave-based electronic control is considered advantageous in terms of cost, robustness, and scalability. According to the research team, the extremely low error rate could significantly reduce the overhead required for quantum error correction, thereby lowering the total number of physical qubits needed to achieve fault tolerance.
While the single-qubit gate fidelity marks a substantial advance, the researchers acknowledge that full-scale quantum computing requires corresponding improvements in two-qubit gate operations, which currently have higher error rates. The experiment was conducted by a team from Oxford’s Department of Physics in collaboration with the University of Osaka, under the UK Quantum Computing and Simulation (QCS) Hub.
Read the official announcement from Oxford University here and coverage by Business Weekly here. The results are detailed in the accepted Physical Review Letters paper, Single-qubit gates with errors at the 10⁻⁷ level, available here.
June 11, 2025
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