Scientists have made a major breakthrough in the development of large-scale quantum computers.
“Noise” remains the biggest problem for the development of quantum computers, and must be solved before they can be widely used and in the revolutionary ways proposed. The new paper suggests a way to handle such noise, in turn potentially opening up a way to control that noise and develop much better quantum computing systems.
Quantum computers could potentially change the way we use technology, by solving problems that are impossible with today’s computers. But, to do this, they need weak enough sound to be reliable.
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The problem of sound remains central to the creation of working and useful quantum computers. In short, it is a result of the errors that are introduced when quantum scientists manipulate the “qubits” that power a quantum computer, and thus noise must be eliminated before any system can be used reliably.
The sound becomes more of a problem, the more qubits there are, and the larger the system, which means that the problem is a particular barrier to building the kinds of large quantum computers that are offered as offering revolutionary new technology in the future .
To do that, scientists need to be able to understand how sound works in a quantum system. So far, they have only been able to use this with very small devices.
But new research, published in Natural Physics, includes new algorithms capable of working in much larger quantum computer devices.
And it has already been successfully applied to the IBM Quantum Experience, an online platform that allows researchers to use quantum computing companies.
They found that the algorithm could successfully diagnose the noise in the system – finding problems that had not been discovered before.
If quantum computers are to be successful, they need to be properly calibrated to avoid noise or errors. But they will also be able to correct these errors if they need to be trusted for important calculations.
To do so, quantum scientists will need to be able to know where the errors are likely to be introduced. Knowing that will optimize their error correction for the specific problems, instead of doing this in a generic way.
The new breakthrough algorithm lets scientists know better how many of these errors should be there, and where they might occur, what could be included in future devices to better correct them errors.
“This protocol opens up numerous opportunities for new diagnostic tools and practical applications,” the researchers write in the new paper, pointing out that it could be used in various ways to make quantum computers better at treating the noise they generate.
“The results are the first implementation of demonstrably rigorous and scalable diagnostic algorithms that can be performed on current quantum devices and beyond,” said Robin Harper, of the University of Sydney, lead author on the new paper.
‘Efficiency learning of quantum noise’ is published today in Natural Physics.
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