IBM compensates for errors, gets usable results out of quantum processor
Enlarge / IBM's Eagle processor has reached Rev3, which means lower noise qubits. Today's quantum processors are error-prone. While the probabilities are small—less than 1 percent in many cases—each operation we perform on each qubit, including basic things like reading its state, has a significant error rate. If we try an operation that needs a…
Qubits 30 meters apart used to confirm Einstein was wrong about...
Enlarge / The quantum network is a bit bulkier than Ethernet. A new experiment uses superconducting qubits to demonstrate that quantum mechanics violates what's called local realism by allowing two objects to behave as a single quantum system no matter how large the separation between them. The experiment wasn't the first to show that local…
Google’s improved quantum processor good enough for error correction
Enlarge / Two generations of Google's Sycamore processor.Google Quantum AI Today, Google announced a demonstration of quantum error correction on its next generation of quantum processors, Sycamore. The iteration on Sycamore isn't dramatic—it's the same number of qubits, just with better performance. And getting quantum error correction isn't really the news—they'd managed to get it…
Grid of atoms is both a quantum computer and an optimization...
QuEra Quantum computing has entered a bit of an awkward period. There have been clear demonstrations that we can successfully run quantum algorithms, but the qubit counts and error rates of existing hardware mean that we can't solve any commercially useful problems at the moment. So, while many companies are interested in quantum computing and…
Qubits surf sound waves between quantum nodes
Aurich Lawson / Getty Images Inspired by the functioning of pulsed lasers, scientists from France and Japan have developed an acoustic counterpart that enables the precise and controlled transmission of single electrons between quantum nodes. Riding the waves The spin of an electron can serve as a basis for creating qubits—the basic unit of information…
IBM clears the 100-qubit mark with its new processor
IBM has announced it has cleared a major hurdle in its effort to make quantum computing useful: it now has a quantum processor, called Eagle, with 127 functional qubits. This makes it the first company to clear the 100-qubit mark, a milestone that's interesting because the interactions of that many qubits can't be simulated using…
D-Wave announces new hardware, compiler, and plans for quantum computing
Enlarge / The current generation of hardware. Tracking quantum computing has been a bit confusing in that there are multiple approaches to it. Most of the effort goes toward what are called gate-based computers, which allow you to perform logical operations on individual qubits. These are well understood theoretically and can perform a variety of…
Google tries out error correction on its quantum processor
Enlarge / Google's Sycamore processor.Google The current generation of quantum hardware has been termed "NISQ": noisy, intermediate-scale quantum processors. "Intermediate-scale" refers to a qubit count that is typically in the dozens, while "noisy" references the fact that current qubits frequently produce errors. These errors can be caused by problems setting or reading the qubits or…
Fiber-guided atoms protect quantum states– clocks, sensing units to come
An atomic clock based on a fountain of atoms. One of light’s most redeeming features is that it can be guided in optical fibers with very little change to its properties. In terms of quantum information processing and sensing, this is important: you stick a bit of information into an optical fiber, and you will…
Donut-shaped BEC may be crucial to fault-protected quantum reasoning
I know I have a reputation for liking lasers. But I’m a bit of a philanderer—I have a secret and unrequited love for Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). BECs are to physicists what lasers were in 1970: an amazing new tool that we are only now coming to grips with. BECs are not formless clouds of atoms.…