In 2019, Google declared that its 53-qubit equipment had accomplished quantum supremacy—performing a process not manageable by a convention computer—but IBM challenged the claim. The very same calendar year, IBM released its 53-little bit quantum computer system. In 2020, IonQ unveiled a 32-qubit system that the enterprise said was the “world’s most highly effective quantum personal computer.” And just this week IBM introduced its new 127-qubit quantum processor, which the push launch described as a “minor miracle of style and design.” “The big news, from my point of view, is it performs,” claims Jay Gambetta, IBM’s vice-president of quantum computing.

Now QuEra claims to have built a device with much far more qubits than any of individuals rivals.

The ultimate goal of quantum computing, of training course, is not to play Tetris but to outperform classical pcs in fixing issues of simple curiosity. Enthusiasts reckon that when these personal computers grow to be impressive enough, maybe in a 10 years or two, they may possibly carry transformative outcomes in fields these as medication and finance, neuroscience and AI. Quantum machines will most likely have to have countless numbers of qubits to deal with these kinds of complicated difficulties.

The amount of qubits, having said that, is not the only variable that issues.

QuEra is also touting the increased programmability of its device, in which each individual qubit is a solitary, extremely-chilly atom. These atoms are precisely organized with a series of lasers (physicists call them optical tweezers). Positioning the qubits will allow the machine to be programmed, tuned to the dilemma under investigation, and even reconfigured in actual time in the course of the computation method. 

“Different problems are likely to call for the atoms to be placed in unique configurations,” claims Alex Keesling, QuEra’s CEO and co-inventor of the technology. “One of the issues that’s unique about our device is that every single time we run it, a few moments a second, we can completely redefine the geometry and the connectivity of the qubits.”

The atom benefit

QuEra’s device was built from a blueprint and technologies refined about various many years, led by Mikhail Lukin and Markus Greiner at Harvard and Vladan Vuletić and Dirk Englund at MIT (all are on QuEra’s founding group). In 2017, an previously model of the device from the Harvard team employed only 51 qubits in 2020, they demonstrated the 256-qubit equipment. Inside two several years the QuEra staff expects to reach 1,000 qubits, and then, without having altering the platform much, they hope to preserve scaling up the method further than hundreds of thousands of qubits.

It is QuEra’s exclusive platform—the bodily way that the procedure is assembled, and the process by which data encoded and processed—that should permit for these leaps of scale.

When Google’s and IBM’s quantum computing techniques use superconducting qubits, and IonQ takes advantage of trapped ions, QuEra’s platform utilizes arrays of neutral atoms that generate qubits with remarkable coherence (that is, a large diploma of “quantumness”). The device utilizes laser pulses to make the atoms interact, exciting them to an strength state—a “Rydberg condition,” described in 1888 by the Swedish physicist Johannes Rydberg—at which they can do quantum logic in a robust way with superior fidelity. This Rydberg solution to quantum computing has been worked on for a few of decades, but technological advances—for instance, with lasers and photonics—were wanted to make it function reliably.

“Irrationally exuberant”

When the laptop or computer scientist Umesh Vazirani, director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Centre, initial acquired about Lukin’s study together these traces, he felt “irrationally exuberant”—it seemed like a marvelous method, though Vazirani questioned no matter if his intuitions had been in contact with reality. “We’ve experienced numerous well-developed paths, this kind of as superconductors and ion traps, that have been labored on for a very long time,” he says. “Shouldn’t we be considering about diverse strategies?” He checked in with John Preskill, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and the director of the Institute for Quantum Info and Make a difference, who certain Vazirani that his exuberance was justified.

Preskill finds Rydberg platforms (not just QuEra’s) attention-grabbing for the reason that they deliver strongly interacting qubits that are very entangled—“and that is exactly where the quantum magic is,” he claims. “I’m very excited about the potential on a fairly shorter time scale to discover unpredicted things.”

In addition to simulating and being familiar with quantum components and dynamics, QuEra is functioning on quantum algorithms for resolving computational optimization issues that are NP-finish (that is, really difficult). “These are actually the initial examples of useful quantum gain involving scientific applications,” claims Lukin.