D-Wave Demonstrates a Fast Gate for Dual-Rail Erasure Qubits
A Nature experiment reports an approximately 500-nanosecond entangling gate that largely preserves detectable photon-loss errors.
A historical D-Wave 2000Q quantum-annealing processor photographed in 2018. It is not the gate-model prototype discussed in the article. Image credit“Latest D-Wave 2000 Qubit Processor” by Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0. · https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Detectable erasures can be easier for codes to handle than errors with unknown locations. D-Wave researchers report an entangling gate that largely preserves detectable photon-loss errors. The result comes from a peer-reviewed Nature experiment with two dual-rail encoded in superconducting microwave cavities.
The paper reports an approximately 500-nanosecond gate, roughly 0.5% erasures per gate and residual Pauli errors below 0.1% in its characterization.
This remains a two-qubit gate demonstration. Predicted benefits for larger surface-code systems come from simulation and depend on additional engineering assumptions. Repeated error-correction cycles on larger hardware would show whether the measured error structure can produce the predicted improvement in logical performance.