The Weekly Digest

IBM detailed 'Starling', a planned fault-tolerant machine using qLDPC codes to cut the qubit overhead of error correction, with a modular roadmap of intermediate processors.

Microsoft announced a processor built on topological qubits made from a topoconductor, aiming for intrinsically more stable qubits. The claims remain debated pending further peer-reviewed evidence.

Scaling a surface code from distance 3 to 5 to 7 on the 105-qubit Willow processor drove the logical error rate down at each step — the first convincing demonstration of a quantum memory operating below the fault-tolerance threshold.

ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA were published as standards, kicking off the global migration to encryption designed to withstand future quantum attacks.

Quantinuum's H-series trapped-ion machines continued to report record quantum-volume and fidelity figures, reinforcing ions as a high-quality (if slower) qubit modality.