What happened
Colorado-based Quantinuum announced a new quantum error-correction record on its 98-qubit commercial quantum computer, Helios. According to the company, the system reached 99.9995% logical fidelity, meaning only five errors per million logical operations.
The result cuts the error rate 10x compared with the company's previous record from September 2026 and 100x compared with the best published result from Google Quantum AI.
How error correction works
Quantum computers process data using qubits, which are highly sensitive to outside disturbances such as heat, stray electromagnetic signals, vibrations and cosmic rays. Scientists therefore use quantum error correction, combining multiple physical qubits into more reliable "logical qubits."
For this experiment, Quantinuum used a technique called a color code on Helios. The team also found that each increase in code distance reduced remaining logical errors by a factor of 12.
Two approaches, one machine
A month earlier, the company demonstrated record-setting logical memory and computation using a different method called Helix. Both experiments ran on the same Helios hardware, showing the company can improve performance by changing error-correction methods without replacing the computer. Helix required 10 physical qubits per logical qubit, while the newer color code used as many as 37 but delivered significantly lower error rates.
Why it matters
Quantinuum says the result strengthens its plan to launch Apollo, a universal fault-tolerant quantum computer, by 2029. Robin Blume-Kohout of Sandia National Laboratories, who was not involved in the work, called it an important milestone and said a scaled-up version could reach the reliability needed for useful fault-tolerant computation with fewer than a million physical qubits.
