Researchers from QuTech, in collaboration with Fujitsu and Element Six, have demonstrated the fault-tolerant operation of a quantum bit using a quantum processor based on spin qubits in diamond.
The team has realized a logical qubit using their recently introdued 29-qubit quantum processor. Their qubits consist of electron and nuclear spins associated with a nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond. These spin qubits can operate at relatively high temperatures up to 10 Kelvin and, by using ultrapure diamonds grown by Element Six, the team has previously shown that they can store quantum states coherently for minutes.
A recent theoretical advance by researchers from the University of Southern California has shown that a 7-qubit system is the smallest possible configuration that allows for fault-tolerant error correction.
An important challenge that the team addressed was to process the information about errors in real time.
This result opens the door to experimentally exploring the concepts of fault-tolerant quantum computation.
The research has been published in Nature.
