Enlarge / Google’s Sycamore processor.
Just lately, when researchers had been testing error correction on Google’s quantum processor, they famous an odd phenomenon the place the entire error-correction scheme would sporadically fail badly. They chalked this as much as background radiation, a mixture of cosmic rays and the occasional decay of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope.
It appeared like a little bit of an amusing apart on the time—Google having by accident paid for an especially costly cosmic ray detector. However the folks behind the processor took the issue very significantly and are again with a brand new paper that