From error mitigation to fault-tolerant quantum computing
IBM Research
IBM Quantum Platform and Qiskit are presented as supporting a continuous path from quantum error mitigation to quantum error correction, including demonstrations of hybrid approaches that aim toward fault-tolerant quantum computing. A recent result encoded 64 logical qubits into 76 physical qubits using 314 T gates and reported about a 10x effective improvement in gate error rates after syndrome post-selection for a 2,336-CZ-gate circuit. The stack is positioned to let researchers experiment across mitigation, detection, and correction with more control (including pulse-level and directed execution) so tradeoffs for larger circuits can be explored before full fault tolerance is available.
Why it matters
A spectrum of error-correcting techniques is enabling useful quantum computation, measured not by logical qubits but by the circuits you can run with them.