Quantinuum's Helios sets a new error correction record with 99.9995% fidelity

[Arrow]

Quantinuum says it has broken the world record for quantum error correction, for the second time in two months. According to the company's announcement, its Helios trapped ion computer reached a logical fidelity of 99.9995 percent. That works out at roughly five errors per million operations

The new result is ten times better than Quantinuum's own record from September, and the company says it is around 100 times lower than the best published result on any other hardware, which was Google Quantum AI's superconducting work in Nature. New Scientist has also covered the result, describing it as pushing quantum computers closer to usefulness

The key was a different code. In September, Quantinuum used its Helix code, which needed ten physical qubits for each logical qubit. This time it used a colour code with up to 37 physical qubits per logical qubit. That costs more qubits, but the error rates were much lower, and logical errors fell exponentially as the code distance increased, dropping by a record factor of 12 at each step

Robin Blume-Kohout of Sandia National Laboratories, who was not involved, described it as a logical qubit nearly 100 times better than its physical components. He also said a scaled up system could reach useful reliability with fewer than a million physical qubits. Chief executive Rajeeb Hazra said the company has crossed the threshold for exponential accuracy improvements

Quantinuum says this puts it within the accuracy range needed for Apollo, its planned fault tolerant computer for 2029. The usual caution applies, because this is a company announcement, and the release itself warns that results achieved in experiments may not carry over at larger scale. No separate research paper is cited yet

Even so, this is a big moment for trapped ions, and for this forum's favourite question of when useful machines will arrive. Steady exponential improvement is exactly what error correction needs to show. If Quantinuum keeps this pace, 2029 looks less like marketing and more like a plan

Is trapped ion technology now the frontrunner for fault tolerance? And does this change your view on when Q-Day might arrive?

Quantinuum Breaks Error-Correction World Record by 10x, Validating its Leading Path to Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing by 2029www.quantinuum.com

2594366 Error Correction Record Pushes Quantum Computers Closer To Usefulnesswww.newscientist.com

[Emma80]

Five errors per million operations is an astonishing number. A few years ago logical qubits were barely better than physical ones

Now they are almost a hundred times better. Progress has been faster than many experts predicted