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Lukin Group wins Physics World Breakthrough of the Year 2024
The Physics World 2024 Breakthrough of the Year goes to Mikhail Lukin, Dolev Bluvstein and colleagues at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and QuEra Computing, and independently to Hartmut Neven and colleagues at Google Quantum AI and their collaborators, for demonstrating quantum error correction on an atomic processor with 48 logical qubits, and for implementing quantum error correction below the surface code threshold in a superconducting chip, respectively.
Errors caused by interactions with the environment – noise – are the Achilles heel of every quantum computer, and correcting them has been called a “defining challenge” for the technology. These two teams, working with very different quantum systems, took significant steps towards overcoming this challenge. In doing so, they made it far more likely that quantum computers will become practical problem-solving machines, not just noisy, intermediate-scale tools for scientific research.