Tech major IBM has announced a new breakthrough in quantum computing, demonstrating for the first time that quantum computers can produce accurate results at a scale of more than 100 qubits reaching beyond leading classical supercomputing.
In their experiment, published in Nature, IBM team demonstrated that it is possible for a quantum computer to outperform leading classical simulations by learning and mitigating errors in the system.
The team used the IBM Quantum ‘Eagle’ quantum processor composed of 127 superconducting qubits on a chip to generate large, entangled states that simulate the dynamics of spins in a model of material and accurately predict properties such as its magnetisation.
Following this groundbreaking work, the company announced that its IBM Quantum systems running both on the cloud and on-site at partner locations will be powered by a minimum of 127 qubits, to be completed over the course of the next year.
“This is the first time we have seen quantum computers accurately model a physical system in nature beyond leading classical approaches,” said Dario Gil, Senior Vice President and Director of IBM Research.
“We are now entering a new era of utility for quantum computing,” he added.
One of the ultimate goals of quantum computing is to simulate components of materials that classical computers have never efficiently simulated.
To verify the accuracy of this modelling, a team of scientists at University of California Berkeley simultaneously performed these simulations on advanced classical computers located at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Purdue University.
As the scale of the model increased, the quantum computer continued to turn out accurate results with the help of advanced error mitigation techniques, even while the classical computing methods eventually faltered and did not match the IBM Quantum system.
“As we progress our mission to bring useful quantum computing to the world, we have solid evidence of the cornerstones needed to explore an entirely new class of computational problems,” said Jay Gambetta, IBM Fellow and Vice President, IBM Quantum.
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