An international team of physicists is the first to implement in the lab an important "error-correction" technique that could play a vital role in the development of practical quantum computers. Known as topological error correction (TEC), the technique is based on "clusters" that each contain eight highly entangled photons. These clusters are useful for this purpose because a measurement on one photon does not destroy the entire entangled state.
The multiparticle cluster state at the centre of the current work was first proposed in 2001 by Robert Raussendorf and Hans Briegel, who were then at the University of Munich. Now at the University of British Columbia in Canada, Raussendorf is also involved in this latest research. Such a cluster could be used to perform "one-way" quantum computing, in which the states of individual particles are measured in a specific sequence so that the quantum state of the remaining particles gives the result of the computation.
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