1,000x Speedup: Scientists Just Broke Through a Major Quantum Computing Bottleneck

A theoretical shortcut could speed up certain operations on protected quantum states by more than a thousand times, giving disturbances less time to corrupt information.

Before quantum computers can help discover drugs or improve energy systems, they need to carry out calculations reliably. One promising approach, called bosonic quantum codes, stores information in states with built-in protection against certain errors. Preparing and controlling those states can be a slow process, giving disturbances more time to interfere with the information being protected.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed a theoretical method that could make some of those operations more than a thousand times faster. The speedup concerns the creation and control of protected quantum states, a task needed to make quantum computing more reliable.

“Our results address one of the major bottlenecks in the field: how to quickly and reliably create and control the error-correcting quantum states that could play an important role in future quantum computers,” says Lei Du, a researcher in Applied Quantum Physics at Chalmers and lead author of the study published in Physical Review Letters.