When Rolls-Royce started it’s quantum journey, we were an outlier looking solely to error-corrected algorithms to make the biggest impact on our business.
Errors in quantum computing come from disruptions due to heat and noise. Quantum states, like qubits – the basic unit of information in quantum computing – are very fragile. Many work best in temperatures colder than deep space and in vacuums 10 billion times lower than earth’s atmosphere.
Some quantum computers are built to minimise these disruptions from heat and noise as far as technically possible but the trade-off is that they can only run short, simple algorithms. Meanwhile, error-corrected computers go a step further and use entanglement – where two quantum particles are inextricably linked, no matter how far apart they are – to create a protected region of logical qubits within part of the machine where errors due to noise are detected and corrected. This allows for much longer and more complicated algorithms.
As we initially predicted, there is now general consensus that noisy quantum computers will have limited business impact, there is still a way to go but we do expect consumer-grade error-corrected quantum computing devices to be available in the cloud in the next few years, including those from our partner Xanadu.