Physicists at the University of Oxford have recorded the most accurate control of a quantum bit to date, clocking just one mistake in 6.7 million single-qubit operations—an error rate of 0.000015 percent. The advance, nearly ten times better than the group’s previous world record set a decade ago, will appear this week in Physical Review Letters under the title “Single-qubit gates with errors at the 10⁻⁷ level.”
To illustrate how rare such misfires now are, Oxford notes that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning in a given year (1 in 1.2 million) than for one of the team’s quantum logic gates to err. That leap in reliability tackles one of the thorniest barriers between today’s lab-scale devices and practical quantum computers.
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