Qubits based on trapped ions can be prepared and manipulated with record-breaking accuracy, offering a promising scalable platform for quantum computing.
The realization, two decades ago, that quantum mechanics can be a powerful resource to speed up important computational tasks [1] led to intense research efforts to find adequate physical systems for quantum computation. One of the hurdles to a viable technology is the requirement to prepare, manipulate, and measure quantum bits (qubits) with near perfect accuracy: Imperfect control leads to errors that can accumulate over the computation process. Techniques like quantum error correction and fault-tolerant designs can, in principle, overcome these errors. But these strategies can be successful only if the error probabilities are lower than a threshold value. They also increase the complexity of the required quantum hardware, since they require additional qubits. Recent calculations [2] suggest that an error probability of less than
The quality of qubit manipulation in a number of physical systems has dramatically improved in the past few years [3, 4], raising hopes that a quantum computer, at a large enough scale to carry out meaningful computations, might be within reach. Now, Thomas Harty at the University of Oxford, UK, and colleagues [5] are reporting an important contribution to this goal with the demonstration that qubits consisting of trapped