This week, IBM researchers said Research results in a diary Nature It demonstrated how quantum computers with over 100 qubits can be used to compete with classical supercomputers. He pitted the two against each other in a challenge where they simulated physics.
“One of the ultimate goals of quantum computing is to simulate the composition of materials that cannot be efficiently simulated by conventional computers,” IBM said in a press release. “Being able to model these is an important step towards our ability to tackle challenges such as designing more efficient fertilizers, building better batteries and developing new drugs.”
Quantum computers, which can simultaneously represent information as zeros, ones, or both, are more effective than classical computers at solving certain problems such as optimization, searching unclassified databases, and simulating nature. is presumed to be But building a useful quantum computer has been difficult, in part because of the delicate nature of qubits (the equivalents of 1s and 0s in classical computing). These qubits are highly sensitive to noise and ambient disturbances, which can lead to errors in their calculations. These small violations can add up as quantum processors get bigger.
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One way to avoid this error is to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer. Another is to handle errors in one of the following ways: alleviate themfix them, or cancel them out.
In experiments published this week, IBM researchers used a 127-qubit Eagle quantum processor to model the spin dynamics of materials and predict properties such as how the materials would respond to magnetic fields. In this simulation, we were able to generate large entangled states in which certain simulated atoms are correlated with each other. Using a technique called zero-noise extrapolation, the team was able to isolate the noise and work out the true answer. To make sure the answers they got from quantum computers were reliable, another team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley ran these same simulations on a set of classical computers, in which he Two matches.
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However, classical computers have upper bounds on this kind of problem, especially as the models become more complex. IBM’s quantum processors are still a long way from quantum supremacy, where they reliably outperform classical computers at the same task, but it is a notable achievement to prove that they can provide useful answers even in the presence of noise.
“This is the first time we’ve seen a quantum computer accurately model physical systems in nature beyond the main classical approaches,” said Dario Gill, senior vice president and director of IBM Research in an article. said in press release. “For us, this milestone proves that today’s quantum computers are capable scientific tools that can be used to model problems that are very difficult, perhaps impossible, for classical systems. It’s an important step in proving and showing that we’re now entering a new era’ of the usefulness of quantum computing. ”
