Nord Quantique, a Canadian company building superconducting quantum computers, announced it has recently published a research paper demonstrating a breakthrough in quantum error correction (QEC). This breakthrough, which is specific to the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP)-based system that Nord Quantique is building, puts it “on par with error rates routinely seen in leading superconducting transmon qubit platforms,” said the company, referring to the type of quantum computer that companies like IBM is building.
Specifically, Nord’s said its paper demonstrates QEC of a single-mode grid state qubit with state preparation and measurement (SPAM) errors below 0.1%; a roughly 100-fold improvement over prior results in comparable GKP-based systems.
SPAM errors represent a fundamental challenge in quantum computing: even the most sophisticated error-correction protocols can be undermined by poorly prepared input states or unreliable readout. Nord Quantique said its research directly addresses this bottleneck and is compatible with its existing high-performance autonomous error correction, achieving superior SPAM performance without any compromise in logical error rates.
This metric has long been the weak link in GKP-based systems, lagging behind other operational benchmarks and capping overall performance, said the announcement. The company also remarked that closing that gap removes a key obstacle and strengthens its path to scalable fault-tolerant quantum computing.
“This breakthrough advances our mission to realize fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2030,” said Julien Camirand Lemyre, CEO and Co-founder of Nord Quantique. “By addressing the fundamental challenge of SPAM errors in our bosonic architecture, we’ve demonstrated that our 1:1 physical-to-logical qubit approach reduces performance limitations on the path to fault tolerance quantum computing.”
The gains stem from a repeat-until-success protocol based on post-selected stabilization, which uses quantum error correction itself to improve preparation fidelity. Rather than relying on real-time corrections and the complex classical control systems they require, the approach prepares a state, verifies whether the preparation succeeded, and either keeps the result or discards it and repeats. This simplification improves both implementation and reliability while drawing on the same error-correction capabilities that underpin Nord Quantique’s architecture.
This protocol is also adapted to prepare magic states, specialized quantum states required for the non-Clifford operations essential to universal quantum computation. High-fidelity magic state preparation is widely regarded as one of the most resource-intensive challenges across leading quantum architectures. By demonstrating it within Nord Quantique’s grid-state architecture, the company says it can achieve a further advantage of performing error correction without additional overhead.
Access the full paper and findings here.
