Quantum Hardware, Quantum Error Correction

D-Wave’s dual-rail qubits detect 90% of errors, FirstQFM confirms

Avatar of Ivy Delaney
October 10, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

D-Wave reports that 90% of errors are detected by its dual-rail qubit architecture, a key step toward reducing the resources needed for fault-tolerant quantum computing. FirstQFM, BBVA, Florida Atlantic University, and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre will gain early access to a simulator of this technology as part of D-Wave’s new gate-model beta program. “Error detection creates an opportunity to recover useful information that might otherwise be discarded,” says Vish Ramakrishnan, CEO of FirstQFM, one of the selected organizations. The program aims to prepare participants for future dual-rail gate-model hardware and explore error-aware programming approaches.

D-Wave’s Dual-Rail Qubits Enable 90% Error Detection

D-Wave’s dual-rail qubit architecture is designed to identify approximately 90% of errors by encoding quantum information across two modes, allowing for the localization of errors as erasures rather than complete data loss. This approach aims to minimize the number of physical qubits and decoding complexity required for fault-tolerant quantum computing, a persistent challenge in the field. The architecture’s efficacy was recently bolstered by a Nature publication detailing a fast, high-fidelity two-qubit entangling gate that maintains the error-detection capabilities inherent in the dual-rail design.

This gate demonstrates the potential for performing complex quantum operations while simultaneously monitoring for and mitigating errors. D-Wave states that the program’s intent is to allow these organizations to explore the company’s fault-tolerance methods before the availability of its gate-model systems.

Alan Baratz described quantum error correction as “a defining challenge in the race to commercially useful gate-model quantum computing,” highlighting the importance of proactive error mitigation strategies. FirstQFM, a company specializing in proprietary foundation models for quantum computing, intends to use the simulator to refine its error-handling techniques. The company plans to apply these models to explore how detected errors and real-time control signals can improve the quality and reliability of quantum calculations, preparing these techniques for testing on future dual-rail hardware.

FirstQFM’s technology operates across multiple layers of the quantum stack, with solutions designed to improve both device performance and application scalability. The foundation-model approach developed by FirstQFM aims to capture the complex structure and behavior of quantum systems, allowing models to adapt to the specific constraints of available hardware. This is particularly relevant as the industry moves toward more complex quantum systems requiring increasingly sophisticated error mitigation strategies. The beta program, and the dual-rail architecture it supports, represents a step toward building quantum computers capable of handling the demands of real-world applications.

Error detection creates an opportunity to recover useful information that might otherwise be discarded. Through D-Wave’s beta program, we plan to apply our proprietary foundation models for quantum computing to explore how detected errors, mid-circuit error signals and real-time control can be used to improve the quality and reliability of quantum computations, while preparing these techniques for future testing on dual-rail gate-model hardware.

More like this
Quantum HardwareEntanglement and teleportation build a new quantum gate architecture
Quantum HardwareIonQ Demonstrates World-First Quantum Memory-Enhanced Interconnect for Distributed Quantum Applications
Quantum Error CorrectionCan Riverlane’s Deltaflow unlock useful quantum computing?
Quantum Error CorrectionResearchers Simulate Noisy Quantum States at Fault Distance Seven
Stay current

See today’s quantum computing news on Quantum Zeitgeist for the latest breakthroughs in qubits, hardware, algorithms, and industry deals.

Tags:
D-Wave dual-rail qubits error correction Superconducting qubits
Avatar of Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

Latest Posts by Ivy Delaney: