Carousel crash course on fault tolerance
Fault tolerance is a difficult topic to get across. It’s technical, layered, and easy to lose track of the main thread. We started using carousels to explain fault tolerance because they gave us a way to break the subject into small, self-contained pieces, while still leaving space for some depth. Each one focuses on a single idea, but when read together they start to form a picture of how the pieces fit.
In this post, we’ve pulled together all of our carousels on fault tolerance into one place. You can think of it as a compact mini-curriculum that lets you explore the key concepts that make quantum fault tolerance so challenging yet remarkably possible.
Here’s what you’ll find:
The quest for logical qubits: Many top QC teams are working on building logical qubits. Why?
How to Read a Surface Code Diagram: Understanding the components and what they mean for error correction.
The logic behind logical qubits: How logical qubits get us to near-perfect quantum computing.
Quantum Fault Tolerance Thresholds: Your simple guide to interpreting threshold plots.
Hardware doesn’t need to be perfect: But we need to understand all its imperfections to make quantum fault tolerance work.
Not all errors are equal: Different types of errors shape quantum error correction thresholds in different ways.
Shifting error thresholds: Using threshold surfaces to navigate multiple interacting imperfections.
99% gate fidelity: Is that all we need? Or is there more to the story?
Why simulating FTQC is so hard: And how Plaquette + NVIDIA are changing that.
What makes a fault-tolerant quantum computer possible? The four key components of a robust architecture and how they affect error correction.
Do you really need 10000 physical qubits? Estimating overheads in Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing.
Together, these eleven carousels give you a crash course in one of the central problems of quantum computing: how to make imperfect devices act as if they were nearly perfect.
