A Harvard University-led team working on a research program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has created the first-ever quantum circuit with logical quantum bits that could enable scalable quantum computers in the future.
The research team is working on DARPA’s Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices, or ONISQ, program to explore the potential of Rydberg atomic qubits to accelerate fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Under the ONISQ project, the team created error-correcting logical qubits using arrays of “noisy” physical Rydberg qubits that could maintain their quantum state, making them suitable for solving diverse complex problems.
“The homogeneity of Rydberg qubits allows them to scale rapidly and also allows them to be manipulated and moved around easily using lasers on a quantum circuit. This overcomes the current error-prone methods of performing qubit operations by having to connect them sequentially, which propagates errors throughout the chip,” said Mukund Vengalattore, ONISQ program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office.
The Harvard team is supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology, Princeton University and QuEra Computing.
