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This excessive fragility may make quantum computing sound hopeless. However in 1995, the utilized mathematician Peter Shor found a intelligent technique to retailer quantum data. His encoding had two key properties. First, it may tolerate errors that solely affected particular person qubits. Second, it got here with a process for correcting errors as they occurred, stopping them from piling up and derailing a computation. Shor’s discovery was the primary instance of a quantum error-correcting code, and its two key properties are the defining options of all such codes.
The primary property stems from a easy precept: Secret data is much less weak when it’s divided up. Spy networks make use of the same technique. Every spy is aware of little or no in regards to the community as a complete, so the group stays protected even when any particular person is captured. However quantum error-correcting codes take this logic to the intense. In a quantum spy community, no single spy would know something in any respect, but collectively they’d know so much.
Every quantum error-correcting code is a selected recipe for distributing quantum data throughout many qubits in a collective superposition state. This process successfully transforms a cluster of bodily qubits right into a single digital qubit. Repeat the method many instances with a big array of qubits, and also you’ll get many digital qubits that you need to use to carry out computations.
The bodily qubits that make up every digital qubit are like these oblivious quantum spies. Measure any one in all them and also you’ll study nothing in regards to the state of the digital qubit it’s part of—a property referred to as native indistinguishability. Since every bodily qubit encodes no data, errors in single qubits received’t break a computation. The data that issues is by some means in every single place, but nowhere specifically.
“You’ll be able to’t pin it all the way down to any particular person qubit,” Cubitt mentioned.
All quantum error-correcting codes can take up no less than one error with none impact on the encoded data, however they’ll all ultimately succumb as errors accumulate. That’s the place the second property of quantum error-correcting codes kicks in—the precise error correction. That is intently associated to native indistinguishability: As a result of errors in particular person qubits don’t destroy any data, it’s at all times doable to reverse any error utilizing established procedures particular to every code.
Taken for a Journey
Zhi Li, a postdoc on the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, was effectively versed within the concept of quantum error correction. However the topic was removed from his thoughts when he struck up a dialog along with his colleague Latham Boyle. It was the autumn of 2022, and the 2 physicists had been on a night shuttle from Waterloo to Toronto. Boyle, an professional in aperiodic tilings who lived in Toronto on the time and is now on the College of Edinburgh, was a well-recognized face on these shuttle rides, which frequently acquired caught in heavy site visitors.
“Usually they may very well be very depressing,” Boyle mentioned. “This was like the best one in all all time.”
Earlier than that fateful night, Li and Boyle knew of one another’s work, however their analysis areas didn’t straight overlap, they usually’d by no means had a one-on-one dialog. However like numerous researchers in unrelated fields, Li was interested by aperiodic tilings. “It’s very onerous to be not ,” he mentioned.
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