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Engineers built a quantum processor from 98 barium ions that makes very few errors.
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In the new Helios processor, 98 barium ions circle along a closed loop, like horses on a carousel. This architecture allows any ion to exchange data with any other, making the system flexible and powerful. Laser pulses, like a conductor's baton, issue commands at the speed of light.
The main problem of quantum computing is errors. The more complex the task, the higher the chance of failure. Helios breaks this pattern: its operations are 99.992% accurate — roughly one error per 12,500 steps. This is a record for systems of this size.
We report on Quantinuum Helios, a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor based on the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) architecture. Helios features $$^{137}$$Ba$$^{+}$$ hyperfine qubits, all-to-all connectivity enabled by a rotatable ion storage ring connecting two quantum operation regions by a junction, speed improvements from parallelized operations, and a new software stack with real-time compilation of dynamic programs. Averaged over all operational zones in the system, we achieve average infidelities of $$2.5(1)\times10^{-5}$$ for single-qubit gates, $$7.9(2)\times10^{-4}$$ for two-qubit gates, and $$4.8(6)\times10^{-4}$$ for state preparation and measurement, none of which are fundamentally limited and likely able to be improved. These component infidelities are predictive of system-level performance in both random Clifford circuits and random circuit sampling, the latter demonstrating that Helios operates well beyond the reach of classical simulation and establishes a new frontier of fidelity and complexity for quantum computers.
