Researchers increased the preservation of logical qubits to 96% on the IBM Heron machine - ForkLog

# Researchers Increased Logical Qubit Fidelity to 96% on IBM Heron Machine

Researchers from the University of Sydney in collaboration with IBM announced a significant improvement in the survivability of logical qubits up to 96% using a new error correction mechanism.

The main obstacle to creating stable machines for transitioning to a new era of FTQC was identified by scientists as "idle noise," which occurs during intermediate measurements of qubits in the middle of the computation cycle.

In modern quantum devices, error correction systems must regularly perform internal checks. However, during these pauses, other processor components lose stability, leading to new failures.

To address this issue, physicists completely redesigned the error correction architecture, drastically reducing the downtime of computations. The new method was tested on the advanced 156-qubit superconducting quantum processor IBM Quantum Heron r2. Thanks to algorithm optimization, the logical qubit survivability per error correction cycle was increased from less than 90% to 96%.

Project leader and Sydney Nano director Steven Bartlett emphasized that this process occurs repeatedly at each stage of computation, and the forced downtime of other components becomes a "serious obstacle" to reliable operation.

Although the result was obtained in laboratory conditions on a single processor, within the scope of a research grant, this development is critically important for the industry. Scalability and fault tolerance remain the main barriers to quantum computing.

Recall that in June, corporations made progress in quantum error correction.

Earlier, IBM planned to achieve the first confirmed cases of quantum advantage by the end of 2026.