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Quantinuum Debuts Helios, a 98‑Qubit Ion System Aiming to Ease Error Correction

The third-generation barium‑ion system prioritizes low error rates to shrink error‑correction overhead through all‑to‑all connectivity.

Overview

  • Helios computes with 98 barium‑ion qubits—up from 56 ytterbium qubits in Quantinuum’s prior H2 system—with ions that can be moved to interact with any other qubit.
  • Quantinuum says Helios can form a logical qubit from two physical ions, reflecting the platform’s low native error rates compared with superconducting approaches.
  • The company reports 99.921% two‑qubit entanglement fidelity and introduces on‑the‑fly error correction accelerated by Nvidia GPUs.
  • Researchers used Helios to run a record quantum simulation of the Fermi–Hubbard model and, in early tests, entangled 94 error‑protected qubits.
  • Quantinuum outlines a roadmap that targets a 192‑qubit Sol machine in 2027 and an Apollo system with thousands of qubits in 2029, describing full fault tolerance as the goal.