“That’s pretty clever, actually,” Sutor says. “It’s a little microwave pulse. That fixes some of the errors.”
The Quantum Elements paper specifically addressed quantum error correction in IBM’s 127-qubit superconducting processor. But these techniques might also be able to be generalized to other types of quantum computers, Sutor says.
And any improvement in error correction will bring usable quantum computers that much closer. So will the other aspect of this announcement—the fact that the new error-correction technique was developed using Quantum Element’s AI-powered, digital-twin-style quantum computer simulator, Constellation.
Most quantum computer simulators allow people developing quantum applications to test them in ideal environments. But real quantum computers have errors and noise. Quantum Elements’ simulator models that noise, allowing developers to test in near-real-world conditions.
There are also other simulation platforms, including IBM’s Qiskit Aer and Quantinuum’s H-Series Emulator.
According to Medalsy, the simulators from IBM and Quantinuum use simplified models that don’t reproduce all the noise. “Quantum Elements’ digital twin is aimed at hardware-faithful simulation at experiment scale,” he says. “It is designed to preserve the full noise signature, both coherent and incoherent.”
