The first step toward creating the biggest quantum computer to date was taken by a device that had over 6000 quantum bits, or qubits, shattering a previous record.
Although there isn’t yet a single, widely accepted architecture for creating a quantum computer, scientists think that systems must include at least tens of thousands of qubits in order to be practical. Hannah Manetsch of the California Institute of Technology and her colleagues have now constructed a device with 6100 qubits, surpassing the previous record held by a machine from Atom Computing with 1180 qubits.
Finally, quantum computers have attained absolute dominance.
Each of them is a neutral caesium atom cooled to near-absolute zero and controlled by laser beams, with all 6100 organized neatly in a grid. According to Manetsch, the researchers constructed the qubits to have features that make them ideal for use in computation, albeit no such computations have yet been conducted.
To allow greater accuracy in computation and longer runtimes for a future quantum computer, they, for example, adjusted the frequency and power of the lasers to guarantee that the naturally brittle qubits keep their quantum states and that the entire grid stays stable for as long as feasible. According to Elie Bataille, a team member at the California Institute of Technology, the team has also verified the lasers’ ability to transfer qubits across various areas of the array, which will be crucial for carrying out computations.
“This is a fantastic example of the simple scaling that neutral atoms can provide,” says Ben Bloom of Atom Computing, a company that also employs neutral atoms in its device.
According to Mark Saffman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the new experiment is promising as evidence that neutral atom quantum computers may be built to extremely large sizes. However, further experimental testing is required before the team’s configuration can be regarded as a complete quantum computer.
“At the California Institute of Technology, team member Kon Leung says the researchers are now beginning to investigate the best ways to get their qubits to run computations and do so in an error-proof way.” “They think they can eventually scale their machine to a million qubits in about ten years,” he says.
