Quantum computers are a study of extremes. On the one hand, they promise to be far more powerful than classical machines in solving certain problems. On the other, their quantum nature is remarkably fragile and sensitive to environmental noise. To perform scalable, useful quantum computations, therefore, scientists need to correct these errors in an efficient way. One important step towards this goal is to perform quantum computations in a way that stops correctable errors from spreading (and thus becoming uncorrectable). Now, for the first time, researchers in Austria and Germany have experimentally demonstrated a universal set of these so-called fault-tolerant quantum operations, laying the groundwork for large-scale, error-corrected quantum computation.
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