Un equipo dirigido por Jeff Thompson de la Universidad de Princeton fue pionero en un enfoque de corrección de errores más eficiente en las computadoras cuánticas. Crédito: Gabriele Meilikhov/Muza Productions
Un nuevo método de corrección de errores.
Los investigadores han descubierto una técnica completamente nueva para corregir errores en los cálculos de la computadora cuántica, eliminando potencialmente una barrera importante para un nuevo y poderoso campo de la computación.
La corrección de errores es un tema bien desarrollado en las computadoras tradicionales. Para transmitir y recibir datos a través de ondas desordenadas, cada teléfono móvil requiere controles y ajustes. Las computadoras cuánticas tienen un inmenso potencial para resolver problemas complejos que las computadoras convencionales no pueden resolver, pero esta capacidad depende del aprovechamiento del comportamiento increíblemente efímero de las partículas subatómicas. Estos comportamientos informáticos son tan transitorios que incluso inspeccionarlos en busca de fallas podría provocar el colapso de todo el sistema.
Un equipo interdisciplinario dirigido por Jeff Thompson, profesor asociado de ingeniería eléctrica e informática en la Universidad de Princeton, y los colaboradores Yue Wu y Shruti Puri en la Universidad de Yale y Shimon Kolkowitz en la Universidad de Wisconsin-Madison, demostraron en un artículo teórico publicado en
“If your baseline error rate is too high, redundancy is a bad strategy,” Thompson said. “Getting below that threshold is the main challenge.”
Rather than focusing solely on reducing the number of errors, Thompson’s team essentially made errors more visible. The team delved deeply into the actual physical causes of error and engineered their system so that the most common source of error effectively eliminates, rather than simply corrupting the damaged data. Thompson said this behavior represents a particular kind of error known as an “erasure error,” which is fundamentally easier to weed out than data that is corrupted but still looks like all the other data.
In a conventional computer, if a packet of supposedly redundant information comes across as 11001, it might be risky to assume that the slightly more prevalent 1s are correct and the 0s are wrong. But if the information comes across as 11XX1, where the corrupted bits are evident, the case is more compelling.
“These erasure errors are vastly easier to correct because you know where they are,” Thompson said. “They can be excluded from the majority vote. That is a huge advantage.”
Erasure errors are well understood in conventional computing, but researchers had not previously considered trying to engineer quantum computers to convert errors into erasures, Thompson said.
As a practical matter, their proposed system could withstand an error rate of 4.1%, which Thompson said is well within the realm of possibility for current quantum computers. In previous systems, the state-of-the-art error correction could handle less than 1% error, which Thompson said is at the edge of the capability of any current quantum system with a large number of qubits.
The team’s ability to generate erasure errors turned out to be an unexpected benefit from a choice Thompson made years ago. His research explores “neutral atom qubits,” in which quantum information (a “qubit”) is stored in a single atom. They pioneered the use of the element ytterbium for this purpose. Thompson said the group chose ytterbium partly because it has two electrons in its outermost layer of electrons, compared to most other neutral atom qubits, which have just one.
“I think of it as a Swiss army knife, and this ytterbium is the bigger, fatter Swiss army knife,” Thompson said. “That extra little bit of complexity you get from having two electrons gives you a lot of unique tools.”
One use of those extra tools turned out to be useful for eliminating errors. The team proposed pumping the electrons in ytterbium and from their stable “ground state” to excited states called “metastable states,” which can be long-lived under the right conditions but are inherently fragile. Counterintuitively, the researchers propose to use these states to encode the quantum information.
“It’s like the electrons are on a tightrope,” Thompson said. And the system is engineered so that the same factors that cause error also cause the electrons to fall off the tightrope.
As a bonus, once they fall to the ground state, the electrons scatter light in a very visible way, so shining a light on a collection of ytterbium qubits causes only the faulty ones to light up. Those that light up should be written off as errors.
This advance required combining insights in both quantum computing hardware and the theory of quantum error correction, leveraging the interdisciplinary nature of the research team and their close collaboration. While the mechanics of this setup are specific to Thompson’s ytterbium atoms, he said the idea of engineering quantum qubits to generate erasure errors could be a useful goal in other systems — of which there are many in development around the world—and is something that the group is continuing to work on.
“We see this project as laying out a kind of architecture that could be applied in many different ways,” Thompson said, adding that other groups have already begun engineering their systems to convert errors into erasures. “We are already seeing a lot of interesting in finding adaptations for this work.”
As a next step, Thompson’s group is now working on demonstrating the conversion of errors to erasures in a small working quantum computer that combines several tens of qubits.
Reference: “Erasure conversion for fault-tolerant quantum computing in alkaline earth Rydberg atom arrays” by Yue Wu, Shimon Kolkowitz, Shruti Puri and Jeff D. Thompson, 9 August 2022, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32094-6
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
