Quantum error correction with silicon spin qubits

Abstract

Large-scale quantum computers rely on quantum error correction to protect the fragile quantum information. Among the possible candidates of quantum computing devices, silicon-based spin qubits hold a great promise due to their compatibility to mature nanofabrication technologies for scaling up. Recent advances in silicon-based qubits have enabled the implementations of high quality one and two qubit systems. However, the demonstration of quantum error correction, which requires three or more coupled qubits and often involves a three-qubit gate, remains an open challenge. Here, we demonstrate a three-qubit phase correcting code in silicon, where an encoded three-qubit state is protected against any phase-flip error on one of the three qubits. The correction to this encoded state is performed by a three-qubit conditional rotation, which we implement by an efficient single-step resonantly driven iToffoli gate. As expected, the error correction mitigates the errors due to one qubit phase-flip as well as the intrinsic dephasing due to quasi-static phase noise. These results show a successful implementation of quantum error correction and the potential of silicon-based platform for large-scale quantum computing.