Physicists have devised a mind-bending error-correction technique that could dramatically boost the performance of quantum computers
When the ancient Incas wanted to archive tax and census records, they used a device made up of a number of strings called a quipu, which encoded the data in knots. Fast-forward several hundred years, and physicists are on their way to developing a far more sophisticated modern equivalent. Their “quipu” is a new phase of matter created within a quantum computer, their strings are atoms, and the knots are generated by patterns of laser pulses that effectively open up a second dimension of time.
Opening a portal to an extra time dimension—even just a theoretical one—sounds thrilling, but it was not the physicists’ original plan. “We were very much motivated to see what new types of phases could be created,” says study co-author Andrew Potter, a quantum physicist at the University of British Columbia. Only after envisioning their proposed new phase did the team members realize it could help protect data being processed in quantum computers from errors.
“Topological phases are intriguing because they offer a way to protect against errors that’s built into the material,” adds study co-author Justin Bohnet, a quantum physicist at the company Quantinuum in Broomfield, Colo., where the experiments were carried out. “This is different to traditional error-correcting protocols, where you are constantly doing measurements on a small piece of the system to check if errors are there and then going in and correcting them.
So he and his colleagues went back to the drawing board until, at last, they struck upon an insight: if they could concoct a pattern of pulses that was somehow itself ordered yet did not repeat in a regular manner, they might create a more resilient topological phase. They calculated that such a “quasi-periodic” pattern could potentially induce multiple symmetries in the processor’s ytterbium qubits while avoiding the unwanted amplifications.
“It’s pretty cool,” agrees Chetan Nayak, an expert on quantum computing at Microsoft Station Q at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the study. He notes that, in general, two-dimensional spatial systems offer better protection against errors than one-dimensional systems do, but they are harder and more expensive to build. The effective second time dimension created by the team sneaks round this limitation.
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