The Sycamore tool, inaugurated by Google almost two years ago, was considered the most powerful quantum computer in the world and announced that it had achieved “quantum supremacy”. However, at the end of June, several researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) announced the development of a more powerful computer than that of the Mountain View firm. Back on this new tool announced more powerful than any quantum computer.

The most powerful quantum computer in the world?

In a paper written by about fifty researchers from the USTC, they claimed to have designed a quantum computer more powerful and therefore more efficient than Sycamore, the quantum computer of Google. Note that this is currently a pre-publication, awaiting validation by experts in the field.

Lead author Jian-Wei Pan says his team’s Juizhang quantum computer was able to solve a problem (a random sampling task of quantum circuits) in just over an hour, compared to the nearly eight years it takes the world’s most powerful classical supercomputers to solve. According to the researcher, his computer would even be able to achieve much more difficult feats in much less time than other tools considered more conventional. Jian-Wei Pan adds:

“The sampling task accomplished by Zuchongzhi in about 1.2 hours would take the most powerful supercomputer at least eight years. Our work highlights the consequent advantage offered by this high-precision programmable quantum platform for performing calculations that conventional machines could not complete in a reasonable time.”

A 66-qubit processor powers the Juizhang

quantum computer
When Google introduced Sycamore in 2019, the system’s quantum processor was a whopping 54 qubits. Chinese scientists have tapped into the “Zuchonghzhi” processor, which has 66 qubits. However, when solving this problem, which is considered to be much more complex than the one carried out by the American giant, they used only 56 qubits. At first glance, one can see that a “tiny” increase in the number of qubbits results in an exponential improvement in the tool’s performance.

This quantum processor is organized in a grid of eleven rows and six columns and uses “Transmon” qubits which are, to popularize, non-linear oscillators that exploit the Josephson effect that can exist between two superconducting materials separated by a layer of insulator or by a non-superconducting metallic material. They consider the processor to be ten billion times more powerful than Sycamore‘s.

Without a doubt, with this new creation, China shows that it is progressing and that it has powerful computers and processors that other regions do not have such as Europe or the United States.

Translated from Chine : un nouvel ordinateur quantique encore plus puissant que Sycamore de Google