Physical and logical qubits
In quantum computing, a qubit is a unit of information analogous to a bit (binary digit) in classical computing, but it is affected by quantum mechanical properties such as superposition and entanglement which allow qubits to be in some ways more powerful than classical bits for some tasks. Qubits are used in quantum circuits and quantum algorithms composed of quantum logic gates to solve computational problems, where they are used for input/output and intermediate computations.
Physical and logical qubits
, most technologies used to implement qubits face issues of stability, decoherence, fault tolerance and scalability. Because of this, many physical qubits are needed for the purposes of error-correction to produce an entity which behaves logically as a single qubit would in a quantum circuit or algorithm; this is the subject of quantum error correction. Thus, contemporary logical qubits typically consist of many physical qubits to provide stability, error-correction and fault tolerance needed to perform useful computations.