IonQ, a world-leading innovation quantum company has proven another milestone with its new barium-based quantum compute that has shown superb performance on reducing preparation and measurement (SPAM) errors, producing accurate and highly reliable quantum computers. The State detection fidelity data has surpassed all other commercial systems, projecting an aid for the future of barium systems to achieve higher algorithmic qubits.
IonQ stated in December that it will use barium ions as qubits in its systems, with an assumption that this would deliver tons of benefits on its system design. Today’s milestone reinforces IonQ’s belief that using barium will result in better state identification and fewer errors, and further validates IonQ’s extension of their qubit arsenal to include barium.
The results have shown a 13x decrease of errors encountered, a significant improvement in the SPAM errors, wOn a per-qubit basis, IonQ has reduced these errors from 50 errors per 10,000 computations down to only 4 per 10,000 computations. In other words, IonQ’s barium qubits have brought the company from a 99.5% state detection fidelity up to an industry-leading 99.96%.
Quantum computing’s continuous adoption in fields ranging from banking to chemistry depends on the accuracy of its computing outputs. Imperfect state preparation at the start of an algorithm, imperfect quantum logic gates when running said algorithm, and imperfect measurement when reading the results are all examples of quantum computer defects. All three sources of error must be minimized for quantum computers to scale while preserving accuracy. With each qubit added, state detection mistakes increase, implying that as systems scale, effective state detection becomes more important. Even assuming perfect quantum logic gates, an average SPAM fidelity of 99 percent would limit a system’s #AQ to around 100; with a SPAM fidelity of 99.96 percent, a system’s #AQ would be limited to around 2000 qubits.
We have already proven that trapped ions yield more algorithmic qubits than any other quantum computer architecture. Today’s announcement demonstrates that our new barium qubits are already paving the way for increased fidelity, adding state detection error reduction as another area where IonQ is clearly leading the field.
Professor Jungsang Kim, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of IonQ.
IonQ extends its technical lead as the commercial quantum computing supplier with the highest state detection fidelity. The algorithmic qubit capacity of IonQ’s forthcoming barium systems is predicted to enhance as a result of this high-fidelity state detection. The team has a firm belief in the barium initiative as it is foreseen to further increase their advantage in future systems.
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