On Monday, Nature released a paper from Google's quantum computing team that provides a key demonstration of the potential of quantum error correction. Thanks to an improved processor, Google's team found that increasing the number of hardware qubits dedicated to an error-corrected logical qubit led to an exponential increase in performance. By the time the entire 105-qubit processor was dedicated to hosting a single error-corrected qubit, the system was stable for an average of an hour.

In fact, Google told Ars that errors on this single logical qubit were rare enough that it was difficult to study them. The work provides a significant validation that quantum error correction is likely to be capable of supporting the execution of complex algorithms that might require hours to execute.

A new fab

Google is making a number of announcements in association with the paper's release (an earlier version of the paper has been up on the arXiv since August). One of those is that the company is committed enough to its quantum computing efforts that it has built its own fabrication facility for its superconducting processors.

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We're nearing the end of the year, and there are typically a flood of announcements regarding quantum computers around now, in part because some companies want to live up to promised schedules. Most of these involve evolutionary improvements on previous generations of hardware. But this year, we have something new: the first company to market with a new qubit technology.

The technology is called a dual-rail qubit, and it is intended to make the most common form of error trivially easy to detect in hardware, thus making error correction far more efficient. And, while tech giant Amazon has been experimenting with them, a startup called Quantum Circuits is the first to give the public access to dual-rail qubits via a cloud service.

While the tech is interesting on its own, it also provides us with a window into how the field as a whole is thinking about getting error-corrected quantum computing to work.

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