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In 2019, Google announced that its 53-qubit machine had achieved quantum dominance — fulfilling a task not managed by a conventional computer — but IBM challenged the claim. In the same year IBM introduced its 53-bit quantum computer. 2020, IonQ It introduced a 32-qubit system, which the company said was “the most powerful quantum computer in the world.” And earlier this week, IBM unveiled a new 127-qubit quantum processor, which it described in a press release as a “little miracle of design”. “The great news, from my point of view, is that it works,” says Jay Gambetta, IBM’s vice president of quantum computing.
Now QuE says it has made a device with far more qubits than any of these rivals.
The ultimate goal of quantum computing, of course, is not to play Tetris but to overcome classical computers to solve problems of practical interest. Fans believe that when these computers become powerful enough, perhaps in a decade or two, they can have transformative effects in areas such as medicine and finance, neuroscience and AI. Quantum machines will need thousands of qubits to handle such complex problems.
The number of qubits, however, is not the only factor that matters.
QuEra is improving the programmability of its device, in which each qubit is a single, ultra-cold atom. These atoms are precisely arranged by means of some lasers (physicists call them optical tweezers). The placement of the qubits allows the machine to be programmed, tuned to the problem being investigated, and reconfigured in real time during the computing process.
“Different problems will require the placement of atoms in different configurations,” says Alex Keesling, CEO of QuE and inventor of the technology. “One of the peculiarities of our machine is that every time we run it, in a second, we can completely redefine geometry and qubit connectivity.”
The advantage of the atom
QuEra’s machine was built from refined blueprints and technologies over several years, led by Harvard’s Mikhail Lukin and Markus Greiner, and MIT’s Vladan Vuletić and Dirk Englund (all on QuEra’s founding team). In 2017, only one previous model of the Harvard device was used 51 qubit; In 2020, a 256 qubit machine was demonstrated. Within two years, the QuEra team expects to reach 1,000 qubits, and then, without changing many platforms, they expect the system to continue to grow by more than hundreds of thousands of qubits.
AHMED OMRAN / QUERA
QuEra is a unique platform — a physical way of assembling a system and a way of encoding and processing information — that should make such leaps and bounds.
While Google and IBM’s quantum computing systems use superconducting qubits, and while using IonQ trapped ions, the QuEra platform uses sets of neutral atoms that produce qubits with impressive coherence (i.e., a high level of “quantity”). The machine uses laser pulses to interact with atoms, exciting them into an energy state — the “Rydberg state,” as described by the Swedish physicist Johannes Rydberg in 1888 — can reliably quantum logic. This Rydberg’s approach to quantum computing it has been practiced for a couple of decades, but technological advances — such as lasers and photonics — were needed to work reliably.
“Irrationally prosperous”
When computer scientist Umesh Vazirani, director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center, first heard about Lukin’s research, he felt “irrationally prosperous” —it seemed like a wonderful view, though Vazirani questioned whether his intuition matched reality. “We’ve had a number of well-developed avenues, such as superconductors and ion traps, that have been worked on for a long time,” he says. “Shouldn’t we think of different schemes?” He checked with John Preskill, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, who assured Vazirani that his prosperity was justified.
Preskill finds Rydberg’s platforms (not just QuE’s) interesting because they create highly interactive intermittent qubits that are so intricate, “and there’s quantum magic,” he says. “I’m pretty excited to learn about unexpected things on a relatively short time scale.”
In addition to simulation and understanding quantum materials and dynamics, QuEra is working on quantum algorithms to solve computational optimization problems NP-complete (which is very hard). “These are really the first examples of the useful quantum advantage associated with scientific applications,” says Lukin.
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