Suppressing quantum errors by scaling a surface code logical qubit

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Abstract Practical quantum computing will require error rates well below those achievable with physical qubits. We accurately model our experiment, extracting error budgets that highlight the biggest challenges for future systems.

🔑 Key Findings

• Quantum error correction 1,2 offers a path to algorithmically relevant error rates by encoding logical qubits within many physical qubits, for which increasing the number of physical qubits enhances protection against physical errors.
• However, introducing more qubits also increases the number of error sources, so the density of errors must be sufficiently low for logical performance to improve with increasing code size.
• Here we report the measurement of logical qubit performance scaling across several code sizes, and demonstrate that our system of superconducting qubits has sufficient performance to overcome the additional errors from increasing qubit number.

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