NSF Awards Yale-Led Center $37.5M for Quantum Error Correction Research

Insider Brief

• Yale will lead a $37.5 million NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute focused on developing practical approaches to quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computing.
• The five-year NSF PRACTIQAL center will bring together physicists, engineers, computer scientists and chemists to address challenges across quantum hardware, control electronics, error-correction codes and algorithms.
• The research will focus on making error correction more efficient and scalable, including through the development of specialized erasure qubits that can identify when and where errors occur.

Press release – A Yale-led multidisciplinary team of researchers has been awarded a $37.5 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) for a center aimed at designing practical and self-correcting quantum computers from top to bottom and pointing the way forward for industry to build reliable machines.

The grant is one of eight that NSF has awarded for large-scale interdisciplinary research centers known as Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes that address major challenges at the frontiers of quantum information science and technology.

Quantum computing holds the promise of solving a range of problems that are nearly impossible for classical computers. Potential applications in materials science, drug design, and more could enhance quality of life and drive economic growth. One of the main challenges, though, is that quantum machines are much more prone to error than classical machines. That’s because qubits— the units of information in quantum computing — are very fragile. In comparison, the ones and zeros of conventional computers are incredibly robust, but quantum states can easily be affected by noise and other factors in their environment.