Rutgers and IBM Demonstrate Real-Time Control Across 100 Qubits

21 October 2026. Researchers from Rutgers, IBM and collaborating institutions have shown that a quantum computer can check what is happening inside it and respond while it is running, repeatedly resetting parts of the system to bring chaotic behavior under control. The study was published in Nature Physics.

The experiment is among the largest demonstrations to date of real-time quantum feedback control, a capability the researchers describe as essential for future fault-tolerant quantum computers. Scaling such machines will require them to identify and correct errors while working, a capability known as error correction.

"To build a fault-tolerant quantum computer, we have to make these checks and corrections not just once or twice, but a huge number of times during a calculation," said Jedediah Pixley, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences and the Director of the Center for Materials Theory. "This experiment is a landmark on that road," said Pixley, a member of the Flatiron Institute and one of the senior authors of the study.

The researchers conducted the experiment on a 156-qubit IBM Quantum Heron processor, selecting a connected chain of as many as 100 qubits. They programmed the system to alternate between two tasks: one mixed information among neighboring qubits, spreading chaos, and the other checked individual qubits and reset them when necessary. The team performed nearly 5,000 operations linking pairs of qubits, along with nearly 5,000 checks and resets.

"The challenge was not simply to measure a qubit, but to do it repeatedly while the rest of the processor continued to operate," said Maika Takita, principal research scientist for quantum error correction and dynamic circuits experiments at IBM. "This experiment shows that present-day hardware can coordinate quantum operations, measurements and resets thousands of times across a large system."

When scrambling occurred more than half the time, the system remained chaotic. When checking and resetting occurred more often, the researchers could guide the qubits toward an orderly state. At about 50-50, a slight change suddenly altered the entire system, a shift physicists call a phase transition. In addition to Rutgers and IBM, researchers affiliated with the City College of New York, the CUNY Graduate Center, Iowa State University, Ames National Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University and Louisiana State University contributed to the study.

Source: The Quantum Insider