E-Mail The key to the incredible speed of a quantum computer lies in its ability to fabricate and manipulate quantum bits, or qubits, typically artificial particles such as ions, superconducting oscillators or protons. Quantum properties allow qubits to form entanglement, a phenomenon that provides far more processing power than the binary bits that drive today's classical computers. Specially designed quantum algorithms, which are lists of operations -- analogous to a cooking recipe -- that tell a computer to do something can further speed up calculations to accelerate scientific advances. Unfortunately, quantum machines have a significant drawback: they are more error-prone than classical computers. Qubits are extremely fragile and difficult to control, and the slightest environmental disturbance, referred to as "noise," such as a vibration or change in temperature, results in persistent and relatively high error rates when executing an algorithm. As a result, today's quantum computing devices and those of the foreseeable future are referred to as Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers, because the noise inherent in the systems frequently produces incorrect results.