Achieving quantum supremacy

Quantum computing concept illustration

Researchers in UC Santa Barbara/Google scientist John Martinis' group have made good on their claim to quantum supremacy. Using 53 entangled quantum bits ("qubits"), their Sycamore computer has taken on -- and solved -- a problem considered intractable for classical computers.

"A computation that would take 10,000 years on a classical supercomputer took 200 seconds on our quantum computer," said Brooks Foxen, a graduate student researcher in the Martinis Group. "It is likely that the classical simulation time, currently estimated at 10,000 years, will be reduced by improved classical hardware and algorithms, but, since we are currently 1.5 trillion times faster, we feel comfortable laying claim to this achievement."

The feat is outlined in a paper in the journal Nature.

The milestone comes after roughly two decades of quantum computing research conducted by Martinis and his group, from the development of a single superconducting qubit to systems including architectures of 72 and, with Sycamore, 54 qubits (one didn't perform) that take advantage of the both awe-inspiring and bizarre properties of quantum mechanics.

"The algorithm was chosen to emphasize the strengths of the quantum computer by leveraging the natural dynamics of the device," said Ben Chiaro, another graduate student researcher in the Martinis Group. That is, the researchers wanted to test the computer's ability to hold and rapidly manipulate a vast amount of complex, unstructured data.

"We basically wanted to produce an entangled state involving all of our qubits as quickly as we can," Foxen said, "and so we settled on a sequence of operations that produced a complicated superposition state that, when measured, returns bitstring with a probability determined by the specific sequence of operations used to prepare that particular superposition. The exercise, which was to verify that the circuit's output correspond to the equence used to prepare the state, sampled the quantum circuit a million times in just a few minutes, exploring all possibilities -- before the system could lose its quantum coherence.

'A complex superposition state'

"We performed a fixed set of operations that entangles 53 qubits into a complex superposition state," Chiaro explained. "This superposition state encodes the probability distribution. For the quantum computer, preparing this superposition state is accomplished by applying a sequence of tens of control pulses to each qubit in a matter of microseconds. We can prepare and then sample from this distribution by measuring the qubits a million times in 200 seconds."

"For classical computers, it is much more difficult to compute the outcome of these operations because it requires computing the probability of being in any one of the 2^53 possible states, where the 53 comes from the number of qubits -- the exponential scaling is why people are interested in quantum computing to begin with," Foxen said. "This is done by matrix multiplication, which is expensive for classical computers as the matrices become large."

According to the new paper, the researchers used a method called cross-entropy benchmarking to compare the quantum circuit's output (a "bitstring") to its "corresponding ideal probability computed via simulation on a classical computer" to ascertain that the quantum computer was working correctly.

"We made a lot of design choices in the development of our processor that are really advantageous," said Chiaro. Among these advantages, he said, are the ability to experimentally tune the parameters of the individual qubits as well as their interactions.

While the experiment was chosen as a proof-of-concept for the computer, the research has resulted in a very real and valuable tool: a certified random number generator. Useful in a variety of fields, random numbers can ensure that encrypted keys can't be guessed, or that a sample from a larger population is truly representative, leading to optimal solutions for complex problems and more robust machine learning applications. The speed with which the quantum circuit can produce its randomized bit string is so great that there is no time to analyze and "cheat" the system.

"Quantum mechanical states do things that go beyond our day-to-day experience and so have the potential to provide capabilities and application that would otherwise be unattainable," commented Joe Incandela, UC Santa Barbara's vice chancellor for research. "The team has demonstrated the ability to reliably create and repeatedly sample complicated quantum states involving 53 entangled elements to carry out an exercise that would take millennia to do with a classical supercomputer. This is a major accomplishment. We are at the threshold of a new era of knowledge acquisition."

Looking ahead

With an achievement like "quantum supremacy," it's tempting to think that the UC Santa Barbara/Google researchers will plant their flag and rest easy. But for Foxen, Chiaro, Martinis and the rest of the UCSB/Google AI Quantum group, this is just the beginning.

"It's kind of a continuous improvement mindset," Foxen said. "There are always projects in the works." In the near term, further improvements to these "noisy" qubits may enable the simulation of interesting phenomena in quantum mechanics, such as thermalization, or the vast amount of possibility in the realms of materials and chemistry.

In the long term, however, the scientists are always looking to improve coherence times, or, at the other end, to detect and fix errors, which would take many additional qubits per qubit being checked. These efforts have been running parallel to the design and build of the quantum computer itself, and ensure the researchers have a lot of work before hitting their next milestone.

Read more at Science Daily

Schrödinger's cat with 20 qubits

Cat in box.

In 1935, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger put forward the thought experiment with the quantum cat, in which the cat is enclosed in a box together with a radioactive sample, a detector and a lethal amount of poison. If the radioactive material decays, the detector triggers an alarm and the poison is released. The special feature is that according to the rules of quantum mechanics, unlike everyday experience, it is not clear whether the cat is dead or alive. It would be both at the same time until an experimenter takes a look. A single state would only be obtained starting from the time of this observation.

Since the early 1980s, researchers have been able to realize this superposition of quantum states experimentally in the laboratory using various approaches. "However, these cat states are extremely sensitive. Even the smallest thermal interactions with the environment cause them to collapse," explains Tommaso Calarco from Forschungszentrum Jülich. Among other things, he plays a leading role in Europe's major quantum initiative, the EU's Quantum Flagship programme. "For this reason, it is only possible to realize significantly fewer quantum bits in Schrödinger cat states than those that exist independently of each other."

Of the latter states, scientists can now control more than 50 in laboratory experiments. However, these quantum bits, or qubits for short, do not display the special characteristics of Schrödinger's cat in contrast to the 20 qubits that the team of researchers have now created using a programmable quantum simulator thus establishing a new record that is still valid even if other physical approaches with optical photons, trapped ions or superconducting quantum circuits are taken into account.

Experts from several of the world's most renowned institutions joined forces to develop the experiment. In addition to the Jülich researchers, scientists from numerous top American universities -- Harvard, Berkeley, MIT and Caltech -- as well as the Italian University of Padua were involved.

"Qubits in the cat state are considered extremely important for the development of quantum technologies," explains Jian Cui. "The secret of the enormous efficiency and performance expected of future quantum computers is to be found in this superposition of states," says the physicist from the Peter Grünberg Institute at Jülich (PGI-8).

Classical bits in a conventional computer always only have one certain value, which is composed of 0 and 1, for example. Therefore, these values can only be processed bit by bit one after the other. Qubits, which have several states simultaneously due to the superposition principle, can store and process several values in parallel in one step. The number of qubits is crucial here. You don't get far with just a handful of qubits. But with 20 qubits, the number of superimposed states already exceeds one million. And 300 qubits can store more numbers simultaneously than there are particles in the universe.

The new result of 20 qubits now comes a little closer to this value, after the old record of 14 qubits remained unchanged since 2011. For their experiment, the researchers used a programmable quantum simulator based on Rydberg atom arrays. In this approach, individual atoms, in this case rubidium atoms, are captured by laser beams and held in place side by side in a row. The technique is also known as optical tweezers. An additional laser excites the atoms until they reach the Rydberg state, in which the electrons are located far beyond the nucleus.

This process is rather complicated and usually takes too much time, such that the delicate cat state is destroyed before it can even be measured. The group in Jülich contributed their expertise in Quantum Optimal Control to solve this issue. By cleverly switching the lasers off and on at the right rate, they achieved a speed up in the preparation process which made this new record possible.

"We practically inflated some atoms to such an extent that their atomic shells merge with the adjacent atoms to simultaneously form two opposite configurations, namely excitations occupying all even or odd sites," explains Jian Cui. "This goes so far that the wave functions overlap as in the analogy of Schrödinger's cat and we were able to create the superposition of the opposite configurations which is also known as the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state."

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