Microsoft and Quantinuum Achieve Breakthrough in Quantum Error Correction, Ushering in New Era for Resilient Quantum Computing

Microsoft and Quantinuum announced a breakthrough in quantum error correction using Quantinuum's hardware and Microsoft's qubit-virtualization system. They ran over 14,000 experiments without a single error.

This moves quantum computing out of the "Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum" (NISQ) era into a new era of resilient quantum computing. NISQ computers are limited by errors and decoherence.

The team combined 30 physical qubits into 4 highly reliable logical qubits using entanglement and error correction. This improved reliability by up to 800x over using just physical qubits.

They achieved 3 key criteria to move beyond NISQ large separation of logical/physical error rates, ability to correct circuit errors, and entanglement between logical qubits.

They demonstrated "active syndrome extraction" - diagnosing and correcting errors without destroying logical qubits. This is a fundamental advance for reliable quantum computing.