D-Wave, known for its quantum annealers, is advancing its gate-based quantum computing efforts with dual-rail qubits. The company has published a paper in Nature detailing a key step: successfully entangling two dual-rail qubits while maintaining their primary advantage—easily detectable photon loss errors.

Dual-rail qubits utilize linked resonators, allowing a single photon to exist in a superposition of states. The most common error, photon loss, acts as an 'erasure' and is readily detectable, simplifying error correction. D-Wave's research demonstrates that entangling these qubits, a process taking approximately 500 nanoseconds, preserves this error hierarchy, with photon loss remaining the dominant error type.

This validation is crucial as D-Wave aims to build more efficient quantum computers. By simplifying error correction, they hope to achieve useful quantum computation with less hardware. The company plans to reach 181 dual-rail qubits by 2028, focusing on mid-circuit erasure detection and reducing error rates as more operations are performed.