Error corrected quantum annealing with hundreds of qubits

TL;DR

This paper introduces error correction techniques for quantum annealing, demonstrating significant improvements in performance with up to 344 superconducting qubits, advancing the development of noise-protected quantum optimization.

Contribution

It develops and experimentally demonstrates error correction methods specifically for quantum annealing, a previously less-explored area in quantum error correction.

Findings

Significant performance improvement with error correction

Successful demonstration on 344-qubit processors

Path toward large-scale noise-protected quantum devices

Abstract

Quantum information processing offers dramatic speedups, yet is famously susceptible to decoherence, the process whereby quantum superpositions decay into mutually exclusive classical alternatives, thus robbing quantum computers of their power. This has made the development of quantum error correction an essential and inescapable aspect of both theoretical and experimental quantum computing. So far little is known about protection against decoherence in the context of quantum annealing, a computational paradigm which aims to exploit ground state quantum dynamics to solve optimization problems more rapidly than is possible classically. Here we develop error correction for quantum annealing and provide an experimental demonstration using up to 344 superconducting flux qubits in processors which have recently been shown to physically implement programmable quantum annealing. We demonstrate a substantial improvement over the performance of the processors in the absence of error correction. These results pave a path toward large scale noise-protected adiabatic quantum optimization devices.