Quantum computers, should they be realized one day, will inevitably make errors. Therefore, they need special error correcting mechanisms. The most important part of it, a so-called Toffoli gate, has now been realized by ETH scientists with superconducting circuits.
Photograph of the superconducting 3-qubit-processor mounted on and connected to a high frequency printed circuit board. (Image: Quantum Device Lab, ETH Zurich)
In a classical computer there happens one error in about ten quadrillion (1016) operations. The goal in quantum computing is to have less than one error in 10.000 (104) operations. Lars Steffen, PhD student in Wallraff’s group and co-author of the publication says that this is a reasonable goal, since errors in quantum computation can never be avoided. «If you want to do complicated quantum information processing, these errors need to be corrected», Andreas Wallraff said.
ETH-professor Andreas Wallraff and his team could now realize a Toffoli gate using a chip with superconducting circuits and could verify its functionality with the newest methods. The results of the study were now published in «Nature».
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