Mitigating cosmic-ray-like correlated events with a modular quantum processor

Physical Applied Review (2025)
 
Quantum computers built from superconducting qubits are growing and now can test small versions of error-correction codes — methods that help protect quantum information from noise. However, systemwide failures can be caused by cosmic rays hitting the chip.

In this paper, researchers tested whether breaking a quantum computer into smaller, connected modules could limit the spread of these errors. Using a setup with one main board and two smaller modules, each containing two qubits, they found that when a disturbance hit one module, the qubits inside it were strongly affected together, but qubits on different modules were mostly unaffected. This shows that modular designs could help contain cosmic-ray-induced errors, making quantum processors more stable and easier to protect with specialized error-correction strategies.

The paper’s authors are Xuntao Wu, Yash Joshi, Hoaxiong Yan, Gustav Andersson, Alexander Anferov, Christopher Conner, Bayan Karimi, Amber King, Shiheng Li, Howard Malc, Jacob Miller, Harsh Mishra, Hong Qiao, Minseok Ryu, Siyuan King, Jian Shi and Andrew Cleland, who conducted their work at the University of Chicago, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Argonne National Laboratory.