Quantinuum and Microsoft have claimed a breakthrough in fault tolerant quantum computing that can lower error rates and improve reliability.

Fault-tolerant quantum computing has been the Holy Grail for the industry as vendors and researchers race to minimize errors. Quantinuum, which recently raised $300 million, is the product of the merger between Honeywell Quantum and Cambridge Quantum Computing in 2021.

According to Quantinuum and Microsoft, teams from both companies were able to create four logical qubits that demonstrate error rates 800 times lower than corresponding physical error rates. The teams were able to run 14,000 independent instances without errors. Here's the full technical paper. 

The system used in the effort featured Quantinuum's 32-qubit H2 quantum processor from Honeywell with Microsoft's error correction. In a blog post, Microsoft said the breakthrough "finally moves us out of the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) level to Level 2 Resilient quantum computing."

The industry is looking to quantum use cases that can be used with supercomputing systems in a hybrid way that incorporates AI, supercomputing and quantum computing.

Microsoft said the technology behind the Quantinuum collaboration will be available in Azure Quantum Elements in the months ahead.

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:

"Giving the fragile state of Qubits, a key focus is to reduce the error rate creating logical Qubits. The collaboration is both a proof of Honeywell’s H2 platform as well as Microsoft's work on error correction. Good to see the cooperation, but it also shows that to get to Quantum use cases in the enterprise, even the largest players can't do it alone."

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