IBM challenged the claim that the machine had achieved quantum supremacy. IBM launched a quantum computer. IonQ said in 2020 that it was the world's most powerful quantum computer. IBM's new quantum processor is described in a press release as a "minor miracle of design". Jay Gambetta, IBM's vice-president of quantum computing, says that the big news is that it works.
QuEra claims to have made a device with more qubits than any of the other competitors.
The ultimate goal of quantum computing is to beat classical computers in solving practical problems. When these computers become powerful enough, enthusiasts think they will have a huge impact in fields such as medicine and finance. Thousands of qubits will be needed to manage such complex problems.
The number of qubits is only one factor.
The enhanced programmability of QuEra's device is that each qubit is a single, ultra-cold atom. The atoms are arranged with lasers. The positioning of the qubits allows the machine to be programmed and even changed in real time during the computation process.
QuEra's CEO and co-inventor of the technology says that different problems are going to require the atoms to be placed in different configurations.
The advantage of the atom.
The QuEra machine was built by a group of people who worked on it for several years. In 2020, the Harvard group demonstrated a machine with a 128-qubit capacity. The QuEra team expects to reach 1,000 qubits within two years, and then they hope to keep scaling up the system beyond hundreds of thousands of qubits.
Mario was made from QuEra qubits.
QuEra has a unique platform that should allow for leaps of scale.
QuEra uses neutral atoms that produce qubits with a high degree of coherence, which is different from the other quantum computing systems. The machine uses lasers to make the atoms interact, exciting them to an energy state described by Johannes Rydberg as a "Rydberg state", in which they can do quantum logic in a robust way with high fidelity. The approach to quantum computing has been worked on for a couple of decades, but technological advances needed to make it work reliably.
Irrationally enthusiastic.
When the computer scientist Umesh Vazirani, director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center, first heard about the research, he felt like it was a wonderful approach, but he wondered if his intuitions were in touch with reality. He says that various well-developed paths, such as superconductors and ion traps, have been worked on for a long time. Shouldn't we be thinking about different schemes? John Preskill, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and the director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter assured Vazirani that his exuberance was justified.
Preskill thinks that the quantum magic is where the qubits are highly entangled. I am excited about the potential to discover unexpected things.
QuEra is working on quantum algorithms for solving NP-complete problems, which is very hard. These are the first examples of useful quantum advantage.
