A team of Australian and international scientists has, for the first time, created a full picture of how errors unfold over time inside a quantum computer—a breakthrough that could help make future quantum machines far more reliable.
The researchers, led by Macquarie University's Dr. Christina Giarmatzi, found that the tiny errors that plague quantum computers don't just appear randomly. Instead, they can linger, evolve and even link together across different moments in time.
The team has made its experimental data and code openly available, and the full study is published in Quantum.
"We can think of it as quantum computers retaining memory of the errors, which can be classical or quantum depending on the way these errors are linked," says Dr. Giarmatzi.
"A lot of quantum protocols assume quantum computers have no such memory (known as Markovian) but that's simply not true."
This type of behavior is one of the key obstacles to building practical, large-scale quantum computers.
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