Several presentations at QEC17 touch on these laboratory efforts. “This year marks a turning point in the field, with several companies and large groups making a push towards sufficiently large quantum computers to enable testing quantum error correction in the lab,” says Jacob Taylor, the co-director of QuICS who helped organize this year’s conference. Similar to the way that conventional error correction defends against corrupted bits, quantum error correction protects qubits by deploying redundancy: If you want to defend one qubit, you should spread its information across many qubits.īut after more than two decades of theoretical progress in the field-from the first realization that fragile qubits might be able to withstand noise, to detailed modern estimates of the bare hardware required, to implement full-blown error-corrected quantum computation-the buzz ahead of QEC17 is that the theory is finally being put into practice. Quantum error correction is a suite of techniques for maintaining stable qubits, the quantum computer analog of the bits in ordinary computers. 11–15, is organized by researchers from the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS) and Georgia Tech. Nearly 200 scientists and theorists from around the world will descend on the University of Maryland campus next week for the 4th International Conference on Quantum Error Correction (QEC17), the world’s premier scientific meeting focused on the protection of quantum computers from their hostile surroundings.