1000 Times faster: Swedish breakthrough cuts quantum computer error risks

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, in collaboration with Tianjin University, have developed a single-period Floquet control method using “quantum lattice gates” to execute operations on bosonic quantum codes over a thousand times faster than previous approaches

Published in Physical Review Letters, the theoretical breakthrough addresses a major latency bottleneck in quantum error correction for superconducting circuits.

The challenge: Decoherence and multi-cycle latency

Quantum computing platforms based on individual two-level qubits are highly sensitive to environmental noise, such as thermal fluctuations, electrical interference, and cosmic radiation. Long gate execution times increase the window of exposure to environmental decoherence, accumulating errors before error-correction algorithms can resolve them.

To increase resilience, researchers use bosonic quantum codes, which store quantum information across continuous-variable microwave fields in superconducting resonators rather than single physical qubits.

However, controlling and shaping these bosonic states previously required driving the quantum system through thousands of repeated control cycles, creating a time-consuming bottleneck that exposed the fragile states to environmental noise.