Andrew C. Potter

Ordinary wires: electrons jostle, lose energy, and heat up: that's resistance. In superconductors, some electrons pair up in sync, like dancers swirling without collisions. But these pairs hide: you can't see them directly, only infer their presence from flawless coordination.

Like an iceberg, the visible part of the code is the data, while beneath the surface lies a massive foundation of auxiliary particles. They quietly monitor noise and fix errors without touching the information. This approach squeezes many protected logical qubits into a modest number of physical ones. The experiment ran on a 98-ion processor inside an electric trap.