News Microsoft says it’s cracked the code on an important quantum computing problem

[News]

Illustration: The Verge

Microsoft says it’s figured out how to improve error rates in quantum computing, bringing quantum computing closer to a commercial state.

The company worked in collaboration with quantum computing hardware maker Quantinuum to improve the performance of the qubit — the very basic unit of quantum computing. Qubits work by holding two different phases at once (instead of just a one and a zero, it’s both), but they aren’t very stable, making it easy for them to lose data. Researchers can now create several “logical qubits,” or qubits that are more stable while holding these different states.

Krysta Svore, vice president of advanced quantum development at Microsoft, told The Verge in an interview that because qubits are prone to errors,...

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