When Rolls-Royce began its quantum journey, we were an outlier looking exclusively for error-correcting algorithms to make the biggest impact on our business.
Errors in quantum computing come from disturbances due to heat and noise. Quantum states, like qubits – the basic unit of information in quantum computing – are very fragile. Many work best at temperatures colder than deep space and in a vacuum 10 billion times lower than Earth’s atmosphere.
Some quantum computers are built to minimize these disturbances caused by heat and noise as much 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—to create a protected area of logical qubits inside a part of the machine where errors caused by 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 expect error-corrected consumer-grade quantum computing devices to be available in the cloud in the next few years, including those of our partner Xanadu.