Quantum Error Correction

By taking advantage of the infinite geometric space of a particular quantum system made up of bosons. The developed error-correction codes could reduce the number of physical quantum switches, or qubits required to scale up these machines to a useful size. 

The advantage of the codes is that they are platform-agnostic and can be developed to work with a wide range of quantum hardware.

Bosonic error correction codes have been demonstrated, like cat codes and binomial codes, efforts have been made to unify all these codes into a common framework. 

Spacing things out in an infinite Hilbert space gives you a qubit that is very robust because it can tolerate common errors like photon loss. Efforts to build a universal, fault-tolerant quantum computer because it can solve problems like materials science, drug discovery, security, and cryptography that classical supercomputers cannot solve.

The challenge is that we need thousands of quantum bits operating without being overwhelmed with errors. Qubits are prone to randomness in that they are allowed to perform various manipulations, while they are highly sensitive to electromagnetic and other interference. Identifying and minimizing such errors is one of the critical tasks in quantum computing.  

Encoding information utilizing quantum superposition is that all the information is superimposed, the final outcome is unresolved until it is being measured. The fragile nature of quantum computation can be overcome by quantum error correction. 

This is done by encoding information redundantly, allowing the correction of errors as they happen during a quantum computation. This can be done by preparing a large number of indistinguishable particles as information carriers, like arrays of electrons, trapped ions or quantum electrical circuits. However, this approach is inefficient as you need to prepare a large network of qubits just to run a qubit. 

Photon is the most common type of bosson, which is also a packet of electromagnetic energy and massless light particle which will be used as encoding quantum information. By trapping bosons in a particular microwave or optical cavity, they will become indistinguishable from one another, while trapped ions can be identified by their location. So this could reduce the number of physical systems required to build a quantum computer.

Reference: 

Novel error-correction scheme developed for quantum computers