On February 29, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) released China’s top 10 scientific advances in 2023 during a ceremony in Beijing.

Among the selections on the list of the country’s top 10 science advances was the breakthrough research “Bosonic-encoded quantum error correction extends the logical qubit lifetime” conducted by the Shenzhen Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering (SIQSE) at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech).

At present, the error rate of superconducting qubits remains more than ten orders of magnitude away from practical application. Quantum error correction (QEC) is essential to build logical quantum circuits with lower error rates.

QEC aims to protect logical qubits from noise by fully utilizing the redundancy of an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. By detecting and correcting errors in real time, the coherent lifetime of logical qubits can be extended.

However, the traditional QEC process often inadvertently introduces new errors, leading to the paradoxical scenario of “the more correct, the more errors”.

How to extend the lifetime of the protected logical qubit beyond the best available physical qubits in the system, i.e., beating the break-even point, is a key criterion for evaluating the practical usefulness of quantum error correction.

In March 2023, under the leadership of Dapeng YU, Chair Professor of the Department of Physics and SIQSE at SUSTech, a team led by Researcher Yuan XU from SIQSE came together with Professor Shi-Biao ZHENG from Fuzhou University and Professor Luyan SUN from Tsinghua University to make an experimental breakthrough in the field of quantum error correction based on superconducting quantum circuit.

They extended the storage time of quantum information beyond the break-even point for the first time through repetitive real-time QEC, demonstrating the QEC advantage. This milestone, published in the prestigious journal Nature, represents a key step towards practical and scalable universal quantum computation.

According to the NSFC, this study stands as the world’s first to extend the storage time of quantum information beyond the break-even point by 16% through active repetitive error detection and correction operations, marking a significant milestone in demonstrating the QEC advantage for fault-tolerant quantum computation.

The selection of China’s top 10 scientific advances in 2023 was sponsored by the NSFC, and hosted by the High Tech Research and Development Center and the Center for Science Communication and Achievement Transformation of the NSFC. It was co-organized by China Basic Science, Science and Technology Review, Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Science Foundation, and Chinese Science Bulletin. It comprised of four stages: nomination, preliminary selection, final selection, and deliberation.

China Basic Science and other publications recommended more than 600 scientific research achievements published between December 1, 2022, and November 30, 2023. From nearly 100 experts in related fields, 30 achievements were chosen.

Over 2,100 high-level experts in the field of basic research, including academicians from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, were invited to vote on the 30 achievements. Following deliberations by the NSFC’s Advisory Committee, the top 10 scientific advances in 2023 were selected.

This marks the third occasion that SUSTech’s achievements have been selected among China’s top 10 scientific advances. In 2019, a research team led by Professor Liyuan ZHANG from the Department of Physics proved the 3D Quantum Hall effect by experiment for the first time, and in 2020, a research team led by Vice President Xueming YANG offered an experimental proof of quantum interference in chemical reactions.