Series exploring the transition from NISQ to FTQC

Not a month passes by without a landmark quantum computing demonstration with noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices. In the span of a decade, we’ve gone from a handful of qubits in a lab to quantum computers with tens or hundreds of qubits that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere in the world, and that can perform tasks that far outstrip the most powerful of supercomputers.

Different from NISQ, another field in quantum computing that has seen exciting recent advances is fault tolerant quantum computing (FTQC). My goal in writing this series is to show how these advances are even more important to the future of quantum computing than recent NISQ demonstrations.

The first part digs deeper into the idea that fault-tolerance is what will unlock the true potential of quantum computing. Subsequent parts will explore how the right roadmaps and architectures can accelerate the path to fault-tolerance; the implications of the first logical qubits and gates that were demonstrated recently; and where we’re headed – the fault-tolerance stack, modularity and beyond.

This series is in collaboration with the GQI team. An executive summary is available on the quantum computing report website.