> [0.1% gate error rate] is still wildly out of reach
This is false. When Fowler et al assumed 0.1% gate error rates would be reached for his estimates in 2012 [0], that was ostentatious. Now it's frankly a bit overly conservative. All the big architectures are approaching or surpassing 0.1% gate error rates.
From 2022 to 2024, the google team improved mean two qubit gate error rate from 0.6% [1] to 0.4% [2]. Quantinuum's Helios has a two qubit gate error rate of 0.08% [3]. IBM has Heron processors available on their cloud service with two qubit gate error rates ranging from 0.2% to 0.7% [4]. Neutral atom machines have demonstrated 0.5% gate error rates [5].
I can think of a case where it turned out that there was some aspect of the noise performance that made the technology unsuitable for running Shor's algorithm. So would one of the presented low noise approaches actually work for Shor's?
This is false. When Fowler et al assumed 0.1% gate error rates would be reached for his estimates in 2012 [0], that was ostentatious. Now it's frankly a bit overly conservative. All the big architectures are approaching or surpassing 0.1% gate error rates.
From 2022 to 2024, the google team improved mean two qubit gate error rate from 0.6% [1] to 0.4% [2]. Quantinuum's Helios has a two qubit gate error rate of 0.08% [3]. IBM has Heron processors available on their cloud service with two qubit gate error rates ranging from 0.2% to 0.7% [4]. Neutral atom machines have demonstrated 0.5% gate error rates [5].
[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1208.0928
[1]: fig 1c of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.06431
[2]: fig 1b of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.13687
[3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05465
[4]: https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/computers?processorType=Heron (numbers may vary as the website is not static)
[5]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.05420