Xanadu achievement in error correction enables better quantum computing overheads

TORONTO, March 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ - Xanadu (xanadu.ai), a leader in photonic quantum computing, has published a research article in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters, demonstrating how photonic qubits can be used to enact any quantum error correction (QEC) code—including codes that use a lot less qubits to suppress errors. This work opens the door to reducing the number of physical qubits needed for early fault-tolerant quantum computation, while preserving an error correction threshold comparable to other performant QEC codes. The flexibility and feasibility of Xanadu's photonic approach is highlighted, especially when considering the finite qubit resources that will be available in early utility-scale quantum computers.

Xanadu's photonic architecture utilizes qubits known as Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) qubits and Xanadu is the only one using GKP qubits as a core component of quantum computing technology. These qubits are powerful in that they add an extra layer of error correction, and allow for a simple set of physical gates for computation. Furthermore, as this publication demonstrates, using GKP qubits have additional advantages: GKP qubits can be entangled through linear optics, which translates to using relatively simple hardware components, to enable the use of arbitrary error-correcting codes.

Beyond showing the possibility of using arbitrary codes with GKP qubits, Xanadu's architecture team also simulates two QEC codes within a broader class known as "quantum low-density-parity-check codes" (qLDPC) to evaluate their architecture. They show that these specific codes enjoy competitive error correction thresholds on top of their favourable qubit encoding rates, allowing for a significant reduction in the required resources for fault-tolerant quantum computing.

"Most of what a quantum computer does is correct for errors. The overheads for this can be quite high, but they are much more manageable if your platform and architecture allow for generating entanglement across many qubits far away from each other. With our new approach, we have shown that Xanadu's photonic hardware—bolstered by optical fibres and on-chip waveguides—can flexibly produce basically all quantum error-correcting codes, including those that can tightly pack many logical qubits. This represents the kind of architectural work we need to do to shorten the path to building useful quantum computers." said Ilan Tzitrin, one of Xanadu's lead quantum architecture scientists.

The advantageous architecture shown here was piloted in Xanadu's recent hardware announcement of Aurora, where Xanadu demonstrated a scalable, networkable, and modular approach to quantum hardware. Xanadu's evolving architecture supports the hardware by supplying less stringent requirements on optical losses and reducing the overheads necessary for fault-tolerant computation. By approaching the error threshold through both quantum hardware and architecture advancements, Xanadu is moving quickly on its mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere.

About Xanadu: Xanadu is a Canadian quantum computing company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Founded in 2016, Xanadu has become one of the world's leading quantum hardware and software companies. The company also leads the development of PennyLane, an open-source software library for quantum computing and application development. Visit xanadu.ai or follow us on X (formerly Twitter) @XanaduAI.

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SOURCE Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc.