Today, noise poses one of the biggest challenges for quantum computation efforts. Be it in the form of dissipated heat, electromagnetic radiation, or something else, noise can disrupt fragile quantum superpositions and lead to errors. The jury is still out on which approach will be most successful in protecting quantum information against noise, but the hope clearly lies in quantum error correction (QEC) protocols. Now, Martin Rymarz of RWTH Aachen University in Germany and colleagues have proposed a novel superconducting circuit implementation that realizes a QEC strategy in which robustness against noise is an intrinsic feature of the hardware [1]. This strategy, known as the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code, was proposed in 2001 [2]. However, implementing it with superconducting circuits has so far been impossible because it requires a large magnetic field. The newly proposed architecture circumvents this obstacle by employing a synthetic magnetic field, pushing the GKP protocol closer to a possible realization.
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