#qubitgate

IonQ will demonstrate record-fidelity and quantum applications at Web Summit 2025.

Web Summit 2025 Portugal

IonQ, the world's leading quantum business, will attend Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal, from November 10–13. The firm will emphasise its world record quantum computing capability, which is speeding up the shift to practical quantum solutions across industries.

At the AI Summit on Thursday, Oxford Ionics co-founder and IonQ President of Quantum Computing Dr. Chris Ballance will speak. A technology journalist, Mary-Ann Russon, will host “Quantum Without Compromise: The Race to Real-world Applications.” Dr. Ballance will discuss how the company's latest engineering advances relate to quantum computing's expanding use in several industries.

Unlock Fault Tolerance with Breakthrough Fidelity

Among IonQ's highlights is its 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity. The company's move towards fault-tolerant and scalable solutions is supported by this quantum computing breakthrough.

Due to qubit fragility, quantum computing requires better fidelity. Calculation errors are reduced by this precision. According to Dr. Ballance, this achievement is “opening the door to practical quantum solutions across sectors” and advancing fault-tolerant systems. Fault-tolerant quantum systems get closer to reality when high fidelity reduces mistake rates and allows longer and more complex calculations and algorithms. This affects the range of problems solved.

A new technology called quantum computing uses quantum physics to do complex computations faster than conventional computers. IonQ helps companies and researchers realise this potential to solve unsolved problems in several industries.

Real-world use cases show 20x performance gains The company is moving from theory to practice. Customers are already witnessing performance gains from IonQ Tempo and Forte Enterprise. Reports say AstraZeneca and Amazon Web Services (AWS) clients and partners have seen 20x performance gains in key tasks. IonQ works with industry leaders like NVIDIA to study applications.

Collaborations and systems are accelerating the creation of meaningful quantum solutions in many fields. Better fidelity and performance allow applications in several essential industries, including:

Financial modelling and services

Production

Biomedical research, drug discovery

Material science

Logistics

Cybersecurity

Defensive

In addition to theoretical demonstrations, IonQ believes this breakthrough fidelity will enable practical applications across industries.

An ambitious roadmap aims for 2 million qubits and the quantum internet

IonQ reaffirmed its aggressive technical goals. To create the most potent quantum computers with two million qubits by 2030, the company plans to greatly expand its technology. This ambitious objective seeks to solve now unsolvable problems that need processing power much beyond the capabilities of traditional computers, coupling the high fidelity achievements as a fundamental concept.

IonQ is leading the way in quantum networking developments, in addition to sheer qubit count. By connecting several quantum computers, this infrastructure investment will provide a more robust and dispersed ecosystem for quantum computing. IonQ is positioned as a major contributor to the development of the future quantum internet its capacity. Secure communication and distributed quantum computing will be made possible by the combination of high-fidelity qubits and networking capabilities.

IonQ accelerates the transition to fault tolerance and breaks the quantum world record with 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity.

The Significance of IonQ's 99.99% Two-Qubit Gate Fidelity

IonQ's technical publications demonstrate 99.99% two-qubit gate integrity, a significant advancement in quantum computing. This achievement is the first instance of a quantum computing company surpassing the critical "four nines" threshold. This noteworthy technical accomplishment sets a new global record in two-qubit gate fidelity and surpasses the previous benchmark of 99.97%, set in 2024 by Oxford Ionics, now an IonQ company.

The error rate of the two-qubit gate is one of the most important metrics for describing a quantum computer. This single statistic effectively sums up the entire performance of quantum computing since it measures the accuracy of quantum operations.

As fidelity rises, fewer errors need to be corrected, allowing customers to run increasingly complex algorithms. The result, which was achieved on a prototype in IonQ's R&D labs, is intended to be the basis for the company's next 256-qubit devices, which are anticipated to be demonstrated in 2026. IonQ expects this hardware performance to be sufficient to scale to millions of qubits by 2030.

High-Fidelity Gates Without the Need for Expensive Cooling

IonQ's record-breaking integrity was achieved by greatly speeding up the computation process in addition to increasing precision. Importantly, IonQ proved the new world record in two-qubit gate fidelity without ground-state cooling, which can be resource-intensive for large-scale systems. By skipping this slow cooling step, IonQ may run at record-level speed and streamline the calculation.

Historically, the primary speed limit in trapped ion quantum computing has been ion cooling, which consumes the majority of the system's runtime. Trapped ion quantum computers often use the quantum CCD (QCCD) design, which allows flexible, long-range qubit connectivity and drastically reduces the gate count compared to fixed connectivity systems. The disadvantage of the QCCD architecture is that when ions shift, the connection graph changes, which elevates the temperature of the ions. To keep qubit error rates steady, ions must be cooled often.

In the pioneering QCCD-based quantum computing demonstrations, cooling occupied an impressive 68% of the system runtime, while ion mobility occupied around 27%. Quantum gate pulses accounted for only about 2% of the system runtime. The speed restriction is based on slow ion transport, which is mostly caused by sluggish ion cooling. "Ground-state cooling" is required to bring temperatures below the "Doppler limit," which is a few hundred microKelvin. Laser cooling, or more specifically Doppler cooling, can quickly cool heated ions to this limit. This "last mile cooling" greatly prolongs the cooling period because the current methods for this "second-stage cooling" are usually orders of magnitude slower.

IonQ made the decision to take a different approach by asking, "What if it could avoid ground-state cooling altogether?" According to Oxford Ionics' 2024 article, prior world records required ground-state cooling due to second-order thermal effects, despite the fact that electrical two-qubit gates are theoretically incredibly temperature-insensitive. IonQ made great strides by developing a very dependable and efficient coherence control technique to combat these heat-sensitive defects. For two-qubit gates over the Doppler limit, IonQ therefore obtained an estimated fidelity of 99.99%. This could result in an order-of-magnitude speedup in quantum computing by removing a major legacy speed constraint.

Utilising Technology for Electronic Qubit Control (EQC)

The breakthrough fidelity is directly attributable to IonQ's unique Electronic Qubit Control (EQC) technology, acquired through the merger with Oxford Ionics. EQC employs precision electronics to control its trapped-ion qubits, as opposed to traditional quantum control methods that rely on bulky and fragile laser systems.

By directly integrating all qubit-control components onto conventional semiconductor chips, IonQ is in a position to manufacture its quantum computers using existing semiconductor fabrication procedures. This approach results in systems that are easier to scale, more stable to operate, and far less expensive to construct. By fine-tuning qubit states with EQC, decoherence a major obstacle in quantum computing can be decreased.

Quickening the Roadmap for Fault-Tolerance

For the industry, breaking through the four-nines barrier is crucial since it drastically reduces the overhead required for mistake correction. IonQ claims that this unparalleled qubit performance leads to a 10¹⁰× (10,000,000,000x) performance increase over a system operating at the previous 99.9% fidelity benchmark on devices of similar size.

This high native gate fidelity advances IonQ's roadmap for large-scale fault-tolerant systems. Using fewer physical qubits to build these large-scale fault-tolerant systems could lower development costs and accelerate time to market. This reduction in qubit overhead and logical error rates is a key differentiator in the race for a practical quantum advantage.

Niccolò de Masi, the chairman and CEO of IonQ, called this result a “watershed moment for IonQ’s quantum leadership,” emphasising that once fault-tolerant quantum systems cross this barrier, they will be years closer to being widely used.