Google celebrates 'impressive' feat of error correction in building quantum computers

Physicists at technology giant Google claimed that they have reached a breakthrough in their attempts to correct errors faced in quantum computers, The Financial Times reported. The milestone is a significant one, as it is a major step into tackling one of the biggest technical barriers in new computing forms.

Hartmut Neven, the head of Google’s quantum efforts, said that the findings of the company's study mark a “milestone on our journey to build a useful quantum computer." The study has been published in the journal 'Nature'. According to Neven, the error correction is “a necessary rite of passage that any quantum computing technology has to go through." 
 
Physicists achieved the milestone at a laboratory in California's Santa Barbara, where they showed that they could decrease the error rate of calculations with the help of making the quantum code bigger. The feat comes after the success of an experiment in 2019, when a Google quantum computer was able to achieve "quantum advantage" by doing a calculation quickly that would have taken thousands of years to perform on a regular computer.

'The Google achievement is impressive,' physicist says

“The Google achievement is impressive, since it is very hard to get better performance with large code size,” said Barbara Terhal, a theoretical physicist at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. “It came down by a little; we need it to come down a lot,” said Neven, who manages quantum-computing operations at the Google headquarters in California.

According to Nature, error correction is an important task for quantum computers, which aim to solve problems that conventional machines cannot, such as factoring large whole numbers into primes. Google has said that the latest achievement is merely the second of the six steps that need to be performed in order to create a practical quantum computer.