Microsoft makes quantum breakthrough, plans commercial offering

At Quantum World Congress on Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it and partner Quantinuum had broken a record in the creation of logical qubits. In addition, Microsoft also announced that it is working with partner Atom Computing to build what it described as the world’s most powerful quantum machine.

“Through this collaboration, we’re bringing a new generation of reliable quantum hardware to customers by integrating and advancing Atom Computing’s neutral atom hardware into our Azure Quantum compute platform,” Jason Zander, executive vice president of strategic missions and technologies at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

“Combining the capabilities of this reliable quantum hardware with our platform for science, Azure Quantum Elements, we are providing a comprehensive discovery suite to achieve scientific quantum advantage,” he added.

A qubit, or quantum bit, is the basic unit of information in quantum computing. Whereas bits in traditional computing have two possible states (0 or 1), qubits can represent a superposition of all states between 0 and 1 simultaneously. This allows quantum algorithms to solve certain problems in a fraction of the time it would take the fastest traditional computer systems.

A logical qubit, as opposed to a physical qubit, is a higher-level abstraction used in fault-tolerant quantum computing to protect against noise and errors.

“The main issue with today’s Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) machines is that the physical qubits are too noisy and error-prone, making the machines impractical for real-world applications,” Zander said. “That’s why we must transition to using reliable logical qubits that combine multiple physical qubits together to protect against noise and to maintain coherence for long-running computations.”

In April, Microsoft and Quantinuum demonstrated logical qubits with an error rate 800 times better than physical qubits. On Tuesday, Zander said the partners had applied their improved qubit virtualization system to create and entangle 12 highly reliable logical qubits on Quantinuum’s 56-physical-qubits H2 machine.

“This represents the largest number of entangled logical qubits, with the highest fidelity, on record,” Zander said.

To show that these improvements in the Azure Quantum compute platform can address real-world challenges, the partners also demonstrated the first end-to-end chemistry simulation combining reliable logical quantum computation with cloud high-performance computing (HPC) and AI. The simulation was able to accurately predict the ground state energy for a specific catalyst problem.

“This demonstration marked a critical step toward ushering in a new generation of hybrid applications that will become increasingly impactful as quantum technologies scale,” Zander said. “Quantum and AI will have the earliest significant impact for scientific discover, and researchers at Microsoft have demonstrated the breakthrough potential of this integration.”

Microsoft also plans to combine the enhanced qubit-virtualization system with Atom Computing’s neutral-atom hardware to create a commercial quantum machine that Zander said will be the most powerful one on record. It will combine Atom’s hardware with Azure Elements and Copilot.

“Our goal is to empower governments and organizations to tackle scientifically and commercially relevant problems with today’s most advanced computational solutions — from designing and predicting properties of chemicals and materials, exploring molecular interactions, simulating complex chemical reactions, and more,” Zander said. “Additionally, we want to help galvanize a quantum-ready ecosystem, providing the critical tools necessary for commercial adoption of these technologies that can help build quantum expertise and create new demand for jobs.”