Resolving catastrophic error bursts from cosmic rays in large arrays of superconducting qubits

By M. McEwen, L. Faoro, K. Arya, A. Dunsworth, Trent Huang, Seon Kim, B. Burkett, Austin G. Fowler, F. Arute, J. Bardin and 43 more. Nature Physics, 2021

218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Scalable quantum computing can become a reality with error correction, provided that coherent qubits can be constructed in large arrays 1 , 2 . The key premise is that physical errors can remain both small and sufficiently uncorrelated as devices scale, so that logical error rates can be exponentially suppressed. However, impacts from cosmic rays and latent radioactivity violate these assumptions. An impinging particle can ionize the substrate and induce a burst of quasiparticles that destroys qubit coherence throughout the device. High-energy radiation has been identified as a source of error in pilot superconducting quantum devices 3 – 5 , but the effect on large-scale algorithms and error correction remains an open question. Elucidating the physics involved requires operating large numbers of qubits at the same rapid timescales necessary for error correction. Here, we use space- and time-resolved measurements of a large-scale quantum processor to identify bursts of quasiparticles produced by high-energy rays. We track the events from their initial localized impact as they spread, simultaneously and severely limiting the energy coherence of all qubits and causing chip-wide failure. Our results provide direct insights into the impact of these damaging error bursts and highlight the necessity of mitigation to enable quantum computing to scale. Cosmic rays flying through superconducting quantum devices create bursts of excitations that destroy qubit coherence. Rapid, spatially resolved measurements of qubit error rates make it possible to observe the evolution of the bursts across a chip.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/770d4914dd8e9041cd770268c6b1df75e8898a09

Citations in the corpus

• Suppressing quantum errors by scaling a surface code logical qubit (2022, unknown): “We attribute many of these high-distance logical errors to a high-energy impact, which can temporarily impart widespread correlated errors to the system [57].”
• Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold (2024, unknown): “This is in stark contrast to the detection fraction bursts caused by quasiparticles observed in previous work [1, 41], which happened once every 10 seconds with a recovery time of 25 − 30 ms.”