A scientist, Dr Benjamin Brown, at the University of Sydney has developed a type of error-correcting code for quantum computers that will free up more hardware to do useful calculations and allow to design better quantum microchips.
Reducing errors in quantum computing is one of the biggest challenges facing scientists before they can build machines large enough to solve useful problems.
Completely eradicating these errors is impossible, so the goal has been to develop a “fault-tolerant” architecture where useful processing operations far outweigh error-correcting operations.
The researcher’s approach to suppressing errors is to use a code that operates across the surface of the architecture in two dimensions. The effect of this is to free up a lot of the hardware from error correction and allow it to get on with the useful stuff.
Two-dimensional codes that currently exist require distillation, more precisely known as magic-state distillation. This is where the quantum processor sorts through the multiple computations and extracts the useful ones. (Phys.org)
His research has been published in Science Advances.
