Overview

• Oxford physicists achieved single-qubit operations with an error rate of 0.000015%, or one error in 6.7 million operations, marking a new global benchmark.
• They controlled trapped calcium ion qubits using electronic microwave signals instead of lasers, increasing stability and lowering technical complexity.
• The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, represent nearly a tenfold improvement over the team’s previous 2014 benchmark.
• By reducing single-qubit errors, the advance decreases the qubit overhead for error correction and could enable smaller and more efficient quantum machines.
• Two-qubit gates still have error rates around one in 2,000 operations, and further reductions in these multi-qubit processes are essential for fully fault-tolerant quantum systems.