Enlarge / Google’s Sycamore processor. (credit: Google) Recently, when researchers were testing error correction on Google’s quantum processor, they noted an odd phenomenon where the whole error-correction scheme would sporadically fail badly. They chalked this up to background radiation, a combination of cosmic rays and the occasional decay of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope. It […]
Tag: Error correction
Google tries out error correction on its quantum processor
Enlarge / Google’s Sycamore processor. (credit: Google) The current generation of quantum hardware has been termed “NISQ”: noisy, intermediate-scale quantum processors. “Intermediate-scale” refers to a qubit count that is typically in the dozens, while “noisy” references the fact that current qubits frequently produce errors. These errors can be caused by problems setting or reading the […]