Quantum in the News

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.

Quantum low-density parity-check codes encode logical qubits with far fewer physical qubits than the surface code, a key ingredient in IBM's fault-tolerance plans.

A reconfigurable neutral-atom processor ran algorithms on dozens of logical qubits with transversal gates, showcasing an architecture competitive with superconducting and trapped-ion approaches.

A 127-qubit IBM processor produced accurate expectation values for a physics simulation at a scale where brute-force classical methods struggle — a landmark 'quantum utility' result (later probed by improved classical algorithms).