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Quantum Computing: Cosmic Rays May Be Major Source Of Qubit Errors
Software engineers may joke that any bug found in their software may be the result of malicious cosmic rays. While some research has identified cosmic rays as potentially being capable of flipping the state of bits in memory that could corrupt data or software execution, the possibility of that happening is infinitesimally small.
But now some researchers think that cosmic rays are not inconsequential when dealing with quantum computers. In fact, cosmic rays have the potential to cause interactions at the quantum level that make quantum computing error correction very difficult. While quantum computing has huge potential, currently researchers are stymied in attempts to overcome the “noisy qubit” problem — errors in computing caused by “noisy” environments.
Youngkyu Sung, graduate student at MIT, said that “despite tremendous progress toward being able to perform computations with low error rates with superconducting quantum bits (qubits), errors in two-qubit gates, one of the building blocks of quantum computation, persist.”
Nir Minerbi, CEO at Classiq CEO, told Fierce Electronics that “fault-tolerant quantum computing is far away from now. To be able to write software of any length with the knowledge of no hardware limitations in these systems, is pretty far off. Optimists would say at least seven years. The more pessimistic would say 10 years or even more.”
But, with all the billions of dollars spent by countries chasing quantum computing, we are learning.
Jonathan DuBois, physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said that “for the most part, schemes designed to correct errors in quantum computers assume that the errors across qubits are uncorrelated — they’re random. Correlated errors are very difficult to correct. We found that if a high-energy cosmic ray hits the device somewhere, it has the potential to affect everything in the device at once. Unless you can prevent that from happening you can’t perform error correction efficiently, and you’ll never be able to build a working system without that.”
Robert McDermott, professor at UW-Madison Physics, said that “I think people are tackling the problem of error correction in an overly optimistic way, blindly assuming that the errors are uncorrelated. The errors are actually correlated, but as we identify the problems and gain a deeper physical understanding, we will find ways to avoid them.”
