Quantum bits are potentially powerful but notoriously error-prone. Now a Harvard team says it has found a way to prevent mistakes — by manipulating individual atoms with laser beams — making quantum processing much more efficient.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the Harvard-team’s experimental quantum computer is potentially four times as powerful as the most advanced quantum chip available for purchase, IBM’s Condor.

Unveiled Dec. 4, Condor boasts over a thousand quantum bits, or qubits — 1,121, to be precise — which is almost three-fold increase over last year’s record-breaking IBM Osprey.

Using current error-correcting methods, it takes more than a thousand physical qubits acting together to form one logical qubit. IBM is now exploring a new, more efficient error-correcting technique it says should allow a mere hundred physical qubits to form a logical qubit. So depending on which technique is used, a high-end chip with a thousand physical qubits, like Condor, could generate as little as one usable logical qubit or as many as ten.

The Harvard team, however, used a radical new approach to error correction that turns a mere 280 physical qubits into 48 logical qubits. That’s about 20 times better than what IBM is hoping to achieve in its next-generation chip and 200 times more efficient than the 1,000-to-one ratio that current techniques try to reach.