IBM's Quantum Chip Smashes Supercomputing Records in Record-Breaking Experiment

A team of researchers led by Tigran Sedrakyan of BlueQubit has achieved a major milestone in quantum computing, demonstrating that IBM's Quantum Nighthawk chip can perform an experiment in 19 seconds that would take a supercomputer over 110 years to complete.

The experiment, called random-circuit sampling, involves applying 36 rounds of operations to 61 qubits and generating one million results. The team used IBM's cloud platform to run the experiment, which is a significant achievement as it shows that quantum advantage can be achieved on hardware available to outside researchers.

The key to this breakthrough lies in the Nighthawk chip's ability to reset itself quickly and start again, allowing for thousands of circuits to be executed per second. This has made it possible to collect a large amount of data quickly, which is crucial for demonstrating quantum advantage.