Quantinuum announced that its Helios trapped-ion quantum computer has achieved scaling performance beyond the break-even point. The system demonstrated that increasing the size of logical qubits improves performance metrics by a factor of over 10.
The company implemented a new scheme to address leakage errors, where qubits transition to unintended energy states. By using laser light to manipulate these qubits, Quantinuum suppressed leakage errors by a factor of 6.5. Additionally, a software-based system now swaps leaked data qubits for measurement qubits.
In memory experiments, the team utilized 13, 37, and 73 hardware qubits to build color codes with distances of three, five, and seven, respectively. These configurations reduced the logical error rate from 5 x 10 -4 to 5 x 10 -6, representing a scaling factor of roughly 12 per step.
The researchers also tested two-qubit gate operations. While direct hardware operations resulted in an error rate of about 10 -3, the use of a distance five color code reduced this to approximately 7 x 10 -5. The analysis of syndrome data was performed in real time using three distinct software approaches.
