D-Wave Quantum Inc. (Nasdaq: QBTS) has announced a major research breakthrough that advances the development of practical, fault-tolerant gate-model quantum computing.
The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, demonstrate a fast, high-fidelity, two-qubit entangling gate that preserves the error-correction advantages of D-Wave’s superconducting dual-rail qubit architecture.
The paper, titled “An entangling gate for dual-rail erasure qubits,” details a fundamental building block of quantum computation designed to support efficient quantum error correction at scale.
The research demonstrates approximately 99.9% fidelity during two-qubit operations, with fast gate times of about 500 nanoseconds, enabled by native hardware-level error detection.
D-Wave simulations indicate its dual-rail architecture could reduce the logical error rate by as much as a factor of 10 for each increment in error correction, significantly cutting the physical qubit overhead required.
“Gate-model quantum computing’s greatest remaining challenge is not simply building more qubits,” said Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave. “It is building systems that can correct errors efficiently as they scale.”
Dr. Baratz added that the research “confirms our path to commercial fault-tolerant quantum computing is practical and achievable,” citing the combination of speed and high-fidelity performance in the dual-rail architecture.
In many gate-model architectures, correcting quantum errors requires large numbers of additional physical qubits and operations, creating substantial engineering complexity, cost, and performance constraints.
D-Wave’s dual-rail architecture is designed to create a favorable error hierarchy in which the most common quantum errors are also the easiest to correct, a principle the new research validates during two-qubit operations.
“The entangling gate demonstrated through this research is already integrated into our gate-model systems, where it is delivering comparable performance,” said Dr. Robert Schoelkopf, chief scientist at D-Wave.
Dr. Schoelkopf said the results “provide strong evidence that the core architectural principles underpinning our gate-model development roadmap can deliver the speed, fidelity and error-correction efficiency required for practical, fault-tolerant quantum computing.”
The research supports D-Wave’s gate-model development roadmap, which targets a 2032 completion of a 100-logical-qubit system capable of successfully performing more than 1 million operations.
The roadmap is targeting a Lambda of 10, meaning the system becomes 10 times more reliable with each increment in error correction, enabling low logical error rates with far fewer physical qubits.
“This research demonstrates one of the foundational capabilities of our dual-rail architecture and brings us an important step closer to fault-tolerant gate-model quantum computing,” said Dr. Trevor Lanting, chief development officer at D-Wave.
D-Wave describes itself as the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers and the only company to offer dual-platform quantum computing products spanning both annealing and gate-model technologies.
