State preservation by repetitive error detection in a superconducting quantum circuit

Understand

Quantum computing becomes viable when a quantum state can be preserved from environmentally-induced error.

• If quantum bits (qubits) are sufficiently reliable, errors are sparse and quantum error correction (QEC) is capable of identifying and correcting them.
• Adding more qubits improves the preservation by guaranteeing increasingly larger clusters of errors will not cause logical failure - a key requirement for large-scale systems.
• Using QEC to extend the qubit lifetime remains one of the outstanding experimental challenges in quantum computing.