D-Wave Quantum has published a milestone result in Nature: a two-qubit entangling gate for its dual-rail erasure qubits, running at roughly 99.9% fidelity with a gate time of about 500 nanoseconds and an erasure rate of about 0.5% per gate.

The result — detailed in 'An entangling gate for dual-rail erasure qubits', published August 5, 2026 — attacks one of the field's hardest problems: quantum error correction. Dual-rail qubits encode quantum information in pairs of superconducting cavities and exploit a clever property: when an error occurs, it 'announces' itself as an erasure rather than silently corrupting the state, making errors far cheaper to detect and correct.

The gate is a foundational operation for the surface-code error correction that many researchers consider the most promising route to fault-tolerant quantum computing. D-Wave said the demonstration validates that its architecture can execute the operations required for that path, supporting the company's stated target of systems with 100 logical qubits.

The work builds on D-Wave's roughly $550 million acquisition of Quantum Circuits Inc., which brought the dual-rail technology into the company's portfolio. Analysts following the field note that erasure-based error correction could cut the hardware overhead of fault tolerance by roughly an order of magnitude — potentially making error-corrected quantum machines dramatically cheaper to build and operate.

The Nature paper cements D-Wave's position in the race toward commercially useful, error-corrected quantum computers, a goal the industry increasingly sees as the true finish line of the quantum era.

Sources