Exponential suppression of bit or phase errors with cyclic error correction
Google Quantum AI, Zijun Chen, Kevin J. Satzinger, Juan Atalaya, Alexander N. Korotkov, A. Dunsworth, D. Sank, Chris Quintana, Matt McEwen, R. Barends, Paul V. Klimov, Sabrina Hong, Cody Jones, Andre Petukhov, Dvir Kafri, Sean Demura, Brian Burkett, Craig Gidney, Austin G. Fowler, Alexandru Paler, Harald Putterman, I. L. Aleǐner, Frank Arute, Kunal Arya, Ryan Babbush, Joseph C. Bardin, Andreas Bengtsson, Alexandre Bourassa, Michael Broughton, Bob B. Buckley, David A. Buell, Nicholas Bushnell, Benjamin Chiaro, Roberto Collins, William Courtney, Alan R. Derk, Daniel Eppens, Catherine Erickson, Edward Farhi, Brooks Foxen, Marissa Giustina, Ami Greene, Jonathan A. Gross, Matthew P. Harrigan, Sean D. Harrington, Jeremy Hilton, Alan Ho, Trent Huang, William J. Huggins, L. B. Ioffe, Sergei V. Isakov, E. Jeffrey, Jiang Zhang, Kostyantyn Kechedzhi, Seon Kim, Alexei Kitaev, Fedor Kostritsa, David Landhuis, Pavel Laptev, Erik Lucero, Orion Martin, Jarrod R. McClean, Trevor McCourt, Xiao Mi, Kevin C. Miao, Masoud Mohseni, Shirin Montazeri, Wojciech Mruczkiewicz, Josh Mutus, Ofer Naaman, M. Neeley, Charles Neill, Michael Newman, Murphy Yuezhen Niu, Thomas E. O’Brien, Alex Opremcak, Eric Ostby, Bálint Pató, Nicholas Redd, P. Roushan, Nicholas C. Rubin, Vladimir Shvarts, Doug Strain, Marco Szalay, Matthew D. Trevithick, Benjamin Villalonga, T. White, Z. Jamie Yao, P. Yeh, Juhwan Yoo, Adam Zalcman, Hartmut Neven, Sergio Boixo, Vadim Smelyanskiy, Yu Chen, A. Megrant, J. Kelly
Abstract
Abstract Realizing the potential of quantum computing requires sufficiently low logical error rates 1 . Many applications call for error rates as low as 10 −15 (refs. 2–9 ), but state-of-the-art quantum platforms typically have physical error rates near 10 −3 (refs. 10–14 ). Quantum error correction 15–17 promises to bridge this divide by distributing quantum logical information across many physical qubits in such a way that errors can be detected and corrected. Errors on the encoded logical qubit state can be exponentially suppressed as the number of physical qubits grows, provided that the physical error rates are below a certain threshold and stable over the course of a computation. Here we implement one-dimensional repetition codes embedded in a two-dimensional grid of superconducting qubits that demonstrate exponential suppression of bit-flip or phase-flip errors, reducing logical error per round more than 100-fold when increasing the number of qubits from 5 to 21. Crucially, this error suppression is stable over 50 rounds of error correction. We also introduce a method for analysing error correlations with high precision, allowing us to characterize error locality while performing quantum error correction. Finally, we perform error detection with a small logical qubit using the 2D surface code on the same device 18,19 and show that the results from both one- and two-dimensional codes agree with numerical simulations that use a simple depolarizing error model. These experimental demonstrations provide a foundation for building a scalable fault-tolerant quantum computer with superconducting qubits.