Logical qubits start outperforming physical qubits
Quantinuum closes in on breakeven point in quantum error correction
Broomfield, Colorado, August 4th, 2022 — Quantinuum researchers have hit a significant milestone by entangling logical qubits in a fault-tolerant circuit using real-time quantum error correction. The research, published in a new scientific paper that was released on August 3rd, is the first experimental comparison study of different quantum error correction codes in similar environments and presents a collection of several different experiments. These experiments include:
- The first demonstration of entangling gates between two logical qubits done in a fully fault-tolerant manner using real-time error correction
- The first demonstration of a logical entangling circuit that has higher fidelity than the corresponding physical circuit.
This milestone achievement is important because it marks the first time that logical qubits have been shown to outperform physical qubits — a critical step towards fault-tolerant quantum computers.
“Quantinuum’s trapped-ion quantum computing roadmap is designed around continuous upgrades, enabled our flexible architecture and our precision control capabilities. This combination provides for outstanding, first-of-its-kind achievements that help accelerate the entire industry,” said Tony Uttley, President and COO of Quantinuum.
David Hayes, a Theory and Architecture Technical Manager at Quantinuum and co-author of the new research paper, said the research moves quantum computing closer to the point where encoded circuits outperform more primitive operations.
“People have worked with error corrected qubits before, but they haven't reached this sort of special point where the encoded operation is working better than the primitive operation,” Hayes said. “The other thing that's new here is that in other experiments we're doing the error correction while we're doing the operations. An important next step for us is to get the error rate induced by the error correction itself down further."
The findings are described in the new research paper, “Implementing Fault-tolerant Entangling Gates on the Five-Qubit code and the Color Code”. The paper was recently published on the arXiv. Scientists used both the H1-1 and the H1-2 quantum computers, Powered by Honeywell, to compare the Five-Qubit error code and the Distance Three Color Code in these tests.
Quantum researchers are in the early days of experimental quantum error correction with a multitude of codes to test. Quantinuum researchers can explore a wider range of quantum error codes, compared to other quantum hardware designs, due to the architecture of the machine.
The System Model H1 uses a trapped-ion design and a quantum charged coupled device architecture (QCCD). Along with the inherent flexibility of this design, another strength is all-to-all connectivity. All the qubits are connected to each other which makes it easy to move information through chains of ions without creating multiple errors along the way.
“Instead of having to build a new machine every time we want to try a new code, we can just program the machine to run a different code, make the measurements and weigh the different pros and cons,” Hayes said.
Advancing quantum error correction
All forms of technology need error correction including servers in data centers and space probes sending transmissions back to Earth. For Quantinuum and other companies in the quantum computing sector, quantum error correction is one of the most important pillars of progress. Errors prevent quantum computers from producing reliable results before they are overwhelmed. Quantinuum’s researchers are working toward the milestone of fault tolerance, meaning the errors can be suppressed to arbitrarily low levels.
Natalie Brown, another co-author of the paper and an Advanced Physicist at Quantinuum, said that most classical error correction principles fail with quantum computers because of the basic nature of quantum mechanics.
“It becomes very difficult to suppress noise to very small levels, and that becomes a problem in quantum computing,” she said. “The most promising candidate was this quantum error correction, where we take the physical qubits, make a logical qubit.”
Logical qubits are groups of physical qubits working together to perform a computation. For each physical qubit used in a computation, other ancillary qubits perform a range of tasks such as spotting and correcting errors as they occur.
Ciaran Ryan-Anderson, a Senior Advanced Physicist at Quantinuum and also a co-author of the new paper, said the newest research paper builds on research performed in 2021 and published in Physical Review X. That work explained how researchers at Honeywell Quantum Solutions applied multiple rounds of quantum error correction to a single logical qubit.
“One of the first really important things to demonstrate was these repeated rounds of quantum error correction cycles,” he said.
That is one of several milestones on Ryan-Anderson’s quantum error correction checklist:
- Conduct repeated rounds of fault tolerant quantum error correction
- Feed forward and conditionally apply syndrome extraction
- Enable real-time determination of correction for a quantum error correction code
- Demonstrate general algorithmic real-time decoding
- Scale up quantum error correction with two logical qubits
- Hit the breakeven point when logical quantum computing starts to outperform physical quantum computing
“Quantinuum has achieved some of the milestones required to accomplish this now,” Ryan-Anderson said.
Five-Qubit Code vs. Color Code
Building upon the 2021 research involving one logical qubit, the newest research illustrates the Quantinuum team’s progress with quantum error correction and two logical qubits. The team tested two error codes familiar to quantum experts: the Five-Qubit Code and the Color Code. The Five-Qubit Code does not allow for a fault tolerant transversal gate using only two logical qubits. Researchers used “pieceable” fault tolerance to decompose an initially non-fault tolerant logical gate operation into pieces that are individually fault-tolerant. The Color Code, however, does allow the use of a transversal CNOT gate which is naturally fault-tolerant.
How the experiment worked
H1-2 can use up to 12 qubits and H1-1 can use up to 20. The Five-Qubit Code tested on H1-2 while the Color Code tested on H1-1. Both computers use the same surface electrode ion trap to control ytterbium ions as qubits. Ion transport to isolated gate zones with focused laser beams provides low crosstalk gate and mid-circuit measurement operations.
The researchers ran five experiments with different combinations of circuit elements to test the Five-Qubit Code and to understand the impact of fault tolerant design and circuit depth. The team found that the extra circuitry designed to increase fault tolerance had a negative impact on the overall fidelity of the logical operation, due to the large number of CNOT operations required.
The Color Code showed much better results due in part to the ability to use a transversal CNOT gate. The team ran seven experiments to investigate the fault tolerant potential of these codes. With the Color Code, the researchers found that the State Preparation and Measurement circuits benefitted from the addition of fault tolerant circuitry with a significant reduction of error rates: 99.94% for the logical qubits compared to 99.68% for the physical qubits. This was the only additional circuitry required to make the circuit fault tolerant from end-to-end, since the logical CNOT is transversal and naturally fault tolerant.
The researchers concluded that the “relatively economical fault tolerant circuitry of the Color Code will provide a better platform for computation than the qubit efficient five-qubit code.” Also, the researchers found that the Five-Qubit Code would be useful only in systems with far lower physical error rates than quantum computers have at this point in time.
Hayes said the team’s next step will be to surpass the breakeven point and provide proof of the work. “We are getting evidence that we're really darn close to that point, but there's a lot of work that needs to be done to actually prove it,” he said. “Just getting right there is not good enough, you have to actually get past it.”
A new classical+quantum connection
Another advance from this experiment is a new classical processor with enhanced capabilities which will be essential to scalable algorithmic decoders. The data from the classical functions were used to dictate the control flow and operations executed in the quantum program.
The decoders used in these experiments were partially written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly (Wasm). The choice of Wasm provides an efficient, safe, and portable classical language to have functions that are callable from quantum programs.
The decoder implemented in Rust uses many high-level program constructs. The support for these features means that various scalable algorithmic decoders can be ergonomically implemented in various high-level languages that compile to Wasm (such as Rust, C, and C++) and called from quantum programs.
“It was pretty enabling for this particular experiment, and it'll be even more important for future experiments as these things get more and more complicated,” Hayes said.
Another advantage of the trapped ion architecture is the ability to do real-time decision making during the execution of the quantum circuit thanks to long coherence times and the ability to do mid-circuit measurement and reset qubits as needed.
“Our systems have very long coherence times which is super advantageous when integrating in the classical compute real-time decision making,” Hayes said.
The Honeywell Trademark is used under license from Honeywell International Inc. Honeywell International Inc. makes no representations or warranties with respect to this product. This product is produced by Quantinuum.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum company, pioneers powerful quantum computers and advanced software solutions. Quantinuum’s technology drives breakthroughs in materials discovery, cybersecurity, and next-gen quantum AI. With over 500 employees, including 370+ scientists and engineers, Quantinuum leads the quantum computing revolution across continents.
- Letter of intent from the U.S. Department of Commerce proposes to provide R&D funding for Quantinuum to address specific technology bottlenecks in the development of fault-tolerant trapped-ion quantum computers
- Quantinuum expected to partner with leading onshore semiconductor manufacturing and photonics technology suppliers to strengthen U.S. semiconductor supply chain and manufacturing capabilities
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Quantinuum, a leading quantum computing company, today announced a letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s CHIPS Research and Development Office. The letter of intent proposes that Quantinuum would receive federal funding to enable the development of large-scale, fault-tolerant trapped-ion quantum computers that are of national strategic importance.
“With today’s CHIPS Research and Development investments in quantum computing, the Trump administration is leading the world into a new era of American innovation,” said Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. “These strategic quantum technology investments will build on our domestic industry, creating thousands of high-paying American jobs while advancing American quantum capabilities.”
Key to this initiative is overcoming specific technical bottlenecks and strengthening domestic supply chains and manufacturing capabilities, consistent with the U.S. government’s goal of growing its leadership in semiconductor technology and accelerating the commercialization of frontier industries, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
“Quantum computing has the potential to unlock new possibilities across science, industry, and national priorities for decades to come,” said Dr. Rajeeb Hazra, President and CEO of Quantinuum. “This collaboration with the Department of Commerce is designed to help Quantinuum’s path to large-scale, fault-tolerant trapped-ion systems while strengthening the U.S. innovation and manufacturing ecosystem.”
The letter of intent supports Quantinuum’s plan to partner with the CHIPS R&D Office and onshore suppliers GlobalFoundries, for critical semiconductor components, and Monarch Quantum, for integrated photonics, to further optimize key engineering pathways for components within Quantinuum’s future commercial roadmap.
“GlobalFoundries is excited to partner with Quantinuum on their ion-trap quantum technology,” said Tim Breen, CEO of GlobalFoundries. “We believe GF’s differentiated semiconductor platforms in cryo-CMOS, cryo-3D interconnect, and advanced packaging, combined with Quantinuum's deep ion-trap expertise, will help Quantinuum accelerate their quantum system scale-up roadmap to utility-scale quantum computing.”
“Monarch Quantum is proud to partner with Quantinuum to advance U.S. leadership in next-generation computing infrastructure,” said Dr. Timothy Day, Chairman & CEO of Monarch Quantum. “By delivering advanced integrated photonics through a resilient domestic supply chain, we are committed to supporting the secure, scalable manufacturing required for fault-tolerant quantum systems.”
In addition to strengthening domestic semiconductor manufacturing and supply chain resilience, this initiative is expected to support development of a specialized workforce for next-generation quantum computing technologies.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum is a leading quantum computing company offering a full-stack platform designed to make quantum computing deployable in real-world environments. The company has commercially deployed multiple generations of trapped-ion based quantum systems built on the well-established QCCD architecture, which it has implemented with novel designs and capabilities to achieve the industry’s highest accuracy levels based on average two-qubit gate fidelity.1 Quantinuum has active engagements with market leaders across pharmaceuticals, material science, financial services, and government and industrial markets.
The company has a global workforce of approximately 700 employees, including top scientists and researchers. Over 70% of its technology team holds PhDs or Master’s degrees. Quantinuum’s headquarters is in Broomfield, Colorado, with additional facilities across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Qatar, and Singapore.
For more information, please visit www.quantinuum.com.
Cautionary Statement Concerning Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains certain statements that may be deemed “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include all statements that are not historical facts. The words “anticipate,” “assume,” “believe,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “future,” “will,” “seek,” “foreseeable,” the negative version of these words, or similar terms and phrases are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on certain assumptions and assessments made by our management in light of their experience and their perception of historical trends, current economic and industry conditions, expected future developments and other factors they believe to be appropriate. The forward-looking statements included in this release are also subject to a number of material risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to economic, competitive, governmental, and technological factors affecting our operations, markets, products, services and prices. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for Quantinuum to predict all such factors. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made, and, except as required by law, Quantinuum does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
1As of December 31, 2025.
Broomfield, CO, May 20th, 2026 — Quantinuum, a leading quantum computing company, today announced the launch of a new quantum project in collaboration with bp, the global integrated energy company, aimed at modernizing how the energy sector maps the Earth’s subsurface to locate oil and gas resources.
Few tasks in today’s oil and gas sector demand as much raw computational power as seismic imaging. Building on a successful pilot that demonstrated feasibility, bp and Quantinuum are now scaling their approach to simulate more complex subsurface properties.
“This has the potential to be a very important industrial use case for quantum computing,” said Dr. Rajeeb Hazra, President and CEO of Quantinuum. “By enabling higher-fidelity data at a lower computational cost than classical computing, we can potentially provide a more efficient path for energy exploration.”
On classical computers, computational requirements, such as memory, scale with spatial resolution, so doubling the resolution of a seismic image can require up to double the computational resources. By contrast, in an ideal scenario, a quantum computer could theoretically achieve the same resolution gains with the addition of a single qubit,1 potentially compressing simulation timelines while also reducing energy consumption.
Hybrid quantum-classical approaches have the potential to further optimize performance, with quantum processors tackling the most demanding calculations while classical systems manage data logic, allowing results to remain grounded in real-world physics.
If successful, this project could demonstrate that quantum computing can help solve real-world bottlenecks in global infrastructure and resource management.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum is a leading quantum computing company offering a full-stack platform designed to make quantum computing deployable in real-world environments. The company has commercially deployed multiple generations of quantum systems built on the well-established QCCD architecture, which it has implemented with novel designs and capabilities to achieve the industry’s highest accuracy levels based on average two-qubit gate fidelity.2 Quantinuum has active engagements with market leaders across pharmaceuticals, material science, financial services, and government and industrial markets.
The company has a global workforce of approximately 700 employees, including top scientists and researchers. Over 70% of its technology team hold PhDs and Master’s degrees. Quantinuum’s headquarters is in Broomfield, Colorado, with additional facilities across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Qatar, and Singapore.
For more information, please visit www.quantinuum.com.
Cautionary Statement Concerning Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains certain statements that may be deemed “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include all statements that are not historical facts. The words “anticipate,” “assume,” “believe,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “future,” “will,” “seek,” “foreseeable,” the negative version of these words, or similar terms and phrases are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on certain assumptions and assessments made by our management in light of their experience and their perception of historical trends, current economic and industry conditions, expected future developments and other factors they believe to be appropriate. The forward-looking statements included in this release are also subject to a number of material risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to economic, competitive, governmental, and technological factors affecting our operations, markets, products, services and prices. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for Quantinuum to predict all such factors. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made, and, except as required by law, Quantinuum does not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
1 Adding one qubit doubles the dimensionality of the quantum state space, as referenced in "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" by Isaac L. Chuang and Michael A. Nielsen, Cambridge University Press, 2nd Edition (2010)
2 As of December 31, 2025.
Broomfield, CO, May 19th, 2026 — Quantinuum, a leading quantum computing company, today announced a strategic collaboration with Synopsys, a global leader in electronic design automation and engineering simulation, focused on the integration of quantum computing into the modern engineering toolkit to help overcome the “computational wall” believed to be limiting the pace of industrial innovation.
The Challenge: Designing for Accuracy in the Physical World
Modern industrial design depends on high-fidelity simulation to make better decisions earlier — potentially reducing costly prototypes, shortening development cycles, and improving product performance. Across aerospace and advanced electronics, teams rely on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and electromagnetic simulation to predict real-world behavior before build and test.
However, as products become more complex, simulation workloads scale dramatically and can require computational resources that exceed the capabilities of even the most advanced classical supercomputers. As a result, engineers must increasingly balance simulation accuracy against runtime, cost and development speed. The collaboration between Quantinuum and Synopsys seeks to overcome these limitations by integrating quantum computing capabilities directly into advanced engineering workflows.
“Our goal is to turn quantum computing into a practical business advantage for the world’s most innovative companies,” said Dr. Rajeeb Hazra, President and CEO of Quantinuum. “By improving how these core design equations are solved, we aim to help innovators explore more accurate models and accelerate breakthroughs in materials and next-generation technologies.”
Transforming Industrial Design with Quantum Computing
The companies aim to build a scalable, end-to-end workflow that integrates quantum algorithms directly into existing industrial software and libraries. By combining the industry-leading accuracy[1] of Quantinuum’s systems with Synopsys’ deep expertise in engineering simulation and design tools, the partnership aims to make quantum computing a functional part of the modern engineering toolkit.
“This partnership is about giving innovators the tools they need to solve the world’s most difficult design challenges,” said Prith Banerjee, Senior Vice President of Innovation at Synopsys. “By integrating quantum computing into today's engineering workflows, we believe we can accelerate innovation while maintaining the standards and reliability that customers trust.”
The collaboration focuses on three key goals aimed at driving value for the engineering sector:
- Higher Accuracy for the Physical World: Enabling engineers to model critical physical details that were previously too costly for classical supercomputers to capture accurately.
- Faster and More Cost-Effective Simulations: Accelerating simulation timelines to help companies move from concept to prototype faster while significantly reducing R&D costs
- Greater Augmentation and Scale for Existing Workflows: Ensuring new quantum-native solvers maintain the rigorous validation standards and modeling intuition that industrial users demand.
By building on established CFD and electromagnetic capabilities, this effort aims to allow that as quantum computers scale, industrial engineers can explore future computational advantages without having to reinvent their design process. This approach builds on decades of validated engineering expertise while opening a new potential path alongside the new frontier for computing.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum is a leading quantum computing company offering a full-stack platform designed to make quantum computing deployable in real-world environments. The company has commercially deployed multiple generations of quantum systems built on the well-established QCCD architecture, which it has implemented with novel designs and capabilities to achieve the industry’s highest accuracy levels based on average two-qubit gate fidelity.[2] Quantinuum has active engagements with market leaders across pharmaceuticals, material science, financial services, and government and industrial markets.
The company has a global workforce of approximately 700 employees, including top scientists and researchers. Over 70% of its technology team holds PhDs and Master’s degrees. Quantinuum’s headquarters is in Broomfield, Colorado, with additional facilities across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Qatar, and Singapore.
For more information, please visit www.quantinuum.com.
[1] Based on average two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.921% as of December 31, 2025.
[2] Based on average two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.921% as of December 31, 2025.