3 years ago

Category: Data

Powerful quantum computers could potentially fulfill that need for more computing capacity, but current state-of-the-art quantum computers are still relatively error-prone, due to the inherent sensitivity of quantum bits, or qubits, to outside environmental perturbations like temperature fluctuations or errant electromagnetic fields. Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped tech companies like IBM, Amazon, Honeywell, and ColdQuanta from building quantum computers or offering quantum computing services.

Much like how classical computers might add on a parity or “check” bit to a string of binary code as a simple form of error correction, quantum computers need some way to protect fragile quantum information from errors, or from quantum noise that might arise from when qubits are inadvertently affected by the environment outside the machine.

These codes help to distribute quantum information across many qubits and to designate additional qubits that are used to track parity, and to correct errors if they occur.

Additional physical qubits known as ‘measure qubits’ are interlaced with the data qubits and are used to periodically measure the parity of chosen data qubit combinations.