Achieving quantum supremacy becomes attainable within current hardware capabilities using this new architecture.
Alice & Bob, a hardware developer in the quantum computing field, and the research institute Inria have collaboratively introduced a new quantum error correction architecture that uses low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes on cat qubits. This architecture aims to reduce hardware requirements for practical and fault-tolerant quantum computers.
Theoretical work on LDPC codes enables the implementation of gates and the use of short-range connectivity on quantum chips. The advancements allow the reduction of overhead required for quantum error correction.
Over 90% of quantum computing value depends on strong error correction, and the new architecture aims to improve correction by an order of magnitude. The new architecture could operate 100 high-fidelity logical qubits (with an error rate of 10-8) with as few as 1,500 physical cat qubits.
While the qubit variety keeps growing, superconducting, trapped ions, neutral atoms, photonics, spin qubits, and more, its members still share high error rates. Alice and Bob, is betting big on a relatively new member of the qubit zoo, the Cat Qubit (named for Schrödinger’s cat). Alice and Bob recently demonstrated the ability to dramatically suppress bit-flips using its cat qubit technology.
The new architecture, combining LDPC codes and cat qubits, could run Shor’s algorithm with fewer than 100,000 physical qubits, a 200 fold improvement over competing approaches (20 million qubit requirement). The company previously announced the tape out of a chip called Helium 1, which would encode their first logical qubit prototype.
Logical qubits, using the cat qubit LDPC code technique, have sufficiently low error rate. With this, the company could leverage the computing power of 100 logical qubits with as little as 1,500 physical qubits.
The press release suggests that achieving quantum supremacy, outperforming classical computers in simulating quantum systems, becomes attainable within current hardware capabilities using Alice & Bob’s new architecture.
