A new era of quantum computing emerges as Microsoft and Quantinuum partnership advances Logical Qubit development

Quantum computing now more practical for real-world use

News By Efosa Udinmwen published 6 October 2024

Microsoft and Quantinuum claims to have made significant strides in the field of quantum computing through their a joint Azure Quantum project.

The companies say they have successfully created a new generation of highly reliable logical qubits, which are essential for achieving practical applications of quantum computing.

A few months ago, Microsoft and Quantinuum pioneered the creation of highly reliable logical qubits by applying Microsoft’s qubit-virtualization system to Quantinuum's H-Series ion-trap qubits.

Azure Quantum

Initially, the companies managed to produce four logical qubits from 30 physical qubits. The logical error rate for the production was 800 times better than the physical error rate. Although Microsoft considered this feat as impressive, it kept pushing its boundaries and it paid off.

Now, the collaboration has expanded, resulting in the creation of 12 logical qubits from 56 physical qubits on Quantinuum’s H2 machine, showcasing a remarkable 99.8% fidelity in two-qubit operations.

The teams demonstrated the entanglement of these logical qubits in a complex arrangement known as a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state, which is more intricate than previous Bell state preparations. This entanglement resulted in a circuit error rate of 0.0011, significantly lower than the physical qubits' error rate of 0.024. Such advancements not only highlight the potential for deeper quantum computations but also pave the way for fault-tolerant quantum computing, a crucial step towards realizing the full capabilities of quantum technology.

The collaboration between Microsoft and Quantinuum is also a milestone in the application of quantum computing to real-world problems, particularly in the field of chemistry. By integrating logical qubits with artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud high-performance computing (HPC), they successfully tackled a complex scientific problem of estimating the ground state energy of an important catalytic intermediate.

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