Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

According to a report in the morning of February 23, Beijing time, according to the latest article published in the journal Nature, Google has announced a breakthrough in correcting the inherent errors of the current quantum computer. This marks an early but potentially significant step in solving the biggest technical obstacle to quantum computing.

Hartmut Hartmut Neven, head of Google's quantum computing project, said the new discovery marked "an important milestone in our development of practical quantum computers" and that error correction was "a problem that any quantum computing technology must solve".

Because qubits can only keep the quantum state for a very short time, it is difficult for current quantum computers to produce useful results. This means that the information encoded in the quantum system will be lost before the quantum computer completes the calculation. Therefore, finding a way to correct the resulting errors is the biggest challenge for quantum computing technology.

Some quantum computing startups believe that the short-term solution to this problem is to explore new ways to program current "noise machines", but this means that the performance improvement of quantum computers compared with traditional computers is limited. In addition, so far, efforts in this area have not achieved practical results. This also makes more and more people think that quantum computing is not practical until the problem of error correction is solved more comprehensively.

Researchers at Google say they have found a way to spread the information being processed in quantum computers over multiple qubits. This means that even if a single qubit is separated from the quantum state, the system as a whole can keep enough information long enough to complete a calculation.

As Google expands the scale of its technology to run on larger quantum systems, the error rate has been reduced by only 4%, according to an article published in the journal Nature. But the researchers point out that this is the first time that humans have achieved this, and that expanding the size of quantum computers has not led to an increase in the error rate. Mr Nevin said this showed that Google had broken through the "balance point". After that, further development will achieve a stable performance improvement, and eventually lead to the first practical quantum computer.

Google researcher Julian Kelly (Julian Kelly) said the breakthrough came from Google's optimization of all components of quantum computers, involving qubit quality control, control software and cryogenic devices used to cool computers to near absolute zero. These optimizations reduce the number of errors to low enough that expanding the size of the system does not lead to an exponential increase in the error rate.

Google described the breakthrough as the second of six steps needed to build a practical quantum computer. The next step includes perfecting the engineering design of quantum computers so that so-called "logical qubits" can be achieved with only 1000 qubits. Logical qubits are based on physical qubits and can run without errors. Nevin says Google believes a practical quantum computer can be obtained as long as it can figure out how to build 1000 logical qubits and connect them to a single system.

Google's research on quantum computing has been controversial in the past. In 2019, Google published an article in the journal Nature saying that it had achieved "quantum hegemony", that is, allowing quantum computers to perform calculations that could not be done by traditional computers. However, this claim has been challenged by IBM and other companies. With the development of new programming technology and the improvement of traditional computer performance, the time for quantum computing to realize "quantum hegemony" is also being delayed.

In an article published this week, Google researchers said they were "cautious" about the latest breakthrough. They say there is still a chance that error correction will not work when it is applied to larger quantum systems in the future.

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