The Holy Grail of Quantum Computing Is Finally Here. Or Is It?
Andersen and Lensky of Google disagree. They don’t assume the experiment demonstrates a topological qubit, as a result of the thing can’t reliably manipulate info to realize sensible quantum computing. “It is repeatedly stated explicitly in the manuscript that error correction must be included to achieve topological protection and that this would need to be done in future work,” they write to WIRED.
When WIRED spoke with Tony Uttley, the president and COO of Quantinuum, after the corporate’s personal announcement in May, he was steadfast. “We created a topological qubit,” he stated. (Uttley stated final month that he was leaving the corporate.) The firm’s experiments made non-Abelian anyons out of 27 ions of the steel ytterbium, suspended in electromagnetic fields. The staff manipulated the ions to type non-Abelian anyons in a racetrack-shaped entice, and just like the Google experiment, they demonstrated that the anyons may “remember” how they’d moved. Quantinuum printed its ends in a preprint examine on arXiv with out peer overview two days earlier than Nature printed Kim’s paper.
Room for Improvement
Ultimately, nobody agrees whether or not the 2 demonstrations have created topological qubits as a result of they haven’t agreed on what a topological qubit is—even when there may be widespread settlement that such a factor is very fascinating. Consequently, Google and Quantinuum can carry out comparable experiments with comparable outcomes however find yourself with two very completely different tales to inform.
Regardless, Frolov on the University of Pittsburgh says that neither demonstration seems to have introduced the sector nearer to the true technological function of a topological qubit. While Google and Quantinuum seem to have created and manipulated non-Abelian anyons, the underlying methods and supplies used have been too fragile for sensible use.
David Pekker, one other physicist at Pittsburgh, who beforehand used an IBM quantum pc to simulate the manipulation of non-Abelian anyons, says that the Google and Quantinuum tasks don’t showcase any quantum benefit in computational energy. The experiments don’t shift the sector of quantum computing from the place it has been for some time: Working on methods which are too small-scale to but compete with current computer systems. “My iPhone can simulate 27 qubits with higher fidelity than the Google machine can do with actual qubits,” Pekker says.
Still, technological breakthroughs generally develop from incremental progress. Delivering a sensible topological qubit would require all types of research—giant and small—of non-Abelian anyons and the maths underpinning their quirky conduct. Along the best way, the quantum computing trade’s curiosity helps additional some elementary questions in physics.
