In June 2023, Microsoft revealed its own roadmap that it said would be its guide
towards making a reliable quantum supercomputer. Today, the company revealed what it said was a new breakthrough towards completing that goal, with the help of its hardware partner Quantinuum.
In a blog post, Microsoft stated it used its own qubit-virtualization system and combined it with Quantinuum’s ion-trap hardware. As a result, it was able to conduct over 14,000 experiments that did not generate an error. These efforts allowed Microsoft and Quantinuum to create reliable logical qubits that had an error rate of 800 times better than using physical qubits.
Microsoft says this new effort means that quantum computing has moved on from its lowest Foundation Level 1, which uses physical qubits. The company now says it has moved on to the Resilient Level 2, which allows these computers to run on reliable logical qubits.
