David Hayes

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.

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.