![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/SEI_253411889.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Could a new approach help make quantum computers error-free?<\/p>\n
Nord Quantique<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A Canadian quantum computing start-up claims its new qubit will enable much smaller and cheaper error-free quantum computers. But getting there will be a steep challenge.<\/p>\n
To correct its own errors, a traditional computer saves duplicates of information in multiple places, a practice called redundancy. For quantum computers to achieve their own version of redundancy, they typically require many additional quantum bits, or qubits \u2013 hundreds of thousands of them.<\/p>\n
Now, Julien Camirand Lemyre<\/a> at Nord Quantique<\/a> and his colleagues have created a qubit that they say will let them slash that number to mere hundreds. \u201cThe basic underlying idea behind our hardware is\u2026 having qubits that have intrinsic redundancy,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n There are several competing versions of qubits, such as tiny superconducting circuits and extremely cold atoms. Nord Quantique\u2019s qubit is a superconducting cavity filled with microwave radiation: the particles that carry this radiation, photons, are trapped inside the cavity where they bounce back and forth, and information can be encoded into their quantum states.<\/p>\n Similar qubit designs have been built before, but the new one is the first with \u201cmultimode encoding\u201d. This means that the researchers used several of the photon\u2019s properties at once to store information \u2013 an encoding method that makes that data more resilient to common quantum computer errors.<\/p>\n Victor Albert<\/a> at the University of Maryland says that quantum error correction requires either more qubits \u2013 so that information can be stored in a group of connected qubits rather than a single one, protecting the system from any individual qubit\u2019s failure \u2013 or for each qubit to be \u201cbigger\u201d in the sense of how information is stored within it.<\/p>\n The new qubit uses the second technique, storing information in a mathematical space that is effectively four-dimensional, he says.<\/p>\n Because of this, Nord Quantique projects that its fault-tolerant quantum computers will be up to 50 times smaller than those that use qubits made from superconducting circuits, like the most advanced ones built to date. Additionally, the company estimates machines built with its qubits will consume just a tenth as much power as these other machines.<\/p>\n However, Nord Quantique has not yet presented data on more than one qubit. Nor has it used its new qubit in a computation, other than to verify that it does in fact support multimode encoding. Many steps and technical challenges remain on the team\u2019s road to quantum computing at scale.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is too early to tell whether this approach towards fault-tolerant computation\u2026 is intrinsically more advantageous than some of the other approaches pursued,\u201d says Barbara Terhal<\/a> at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n