IonQ, a leading provider of quantum computing solutions globally, reached a major milestone after successfully demonstrating quantum error correction using a real-time decoder that can run on a single central processing unit (CPU). The achievement allows quantum computing to be scaled without having to scale classical hardware with it. 

Quantum error correction is a major bottleneck that is significantly delaying the rollout of quantum computing in the real world. While quantum computers are capable of carrying out calculations at exponential scales when compared to classical computers, they also acquire errors in these computations quite easily, making the entire exercise futile, if the errors cannot be rectified. 

Multiple approaches have been attempted to reduce these errors, such as the development of logical qubits, which combine multiple physical qubits into a large virtual one, or flipping the errors themselves to arrive at the correct answers. While these approaches have been found to be helpful, they also increase the cost of deploying quantum computers, which makes it unfeasible for commercial rollout. 

Maryland-headquartered IonQ, which has been offering quantum computing services to cloud providers since 2021, has now demonstrated a new and unique error correction approach that works using an off-the-shelf CPU. 

Since making measurements of a qubit destroys its quantum state, researchers can only gather information about their syndromes to know if the qubit has accumulated an error or not. Using this information, which even a classical computer can process, researchers can apply quantum error correction. 

Researchers typically devise decoding algorithms that run either on CPU’s, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), or a field-programmable gate array to analyze these syndromes and then apply a correction to the computation.

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