Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 31645734.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41586-019-1666-5.
- No licence information is recorded for this record.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
The promise of quantum computers is that certain computational tasks might be executed exponentially faster on a quantum processor than on a classical processor<sup>1</sup>. A fundamental challenge is to build a high-fidelity processor capable of running quantum algorithms in an exponentially large computational space. Here we report the use of a processor with programmable superconducting qubits<sup>2-7</sup> to create quantum states on 53 qubits, corresponding to a computational state-space of dimension 2<sup>53</sup> (about 10<sup>16</sup>). Measurements from repeated experiments sample the resulting probability distribution, which we verify using classical simulations. Our Sycamore processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times-our benchmarks currently indicate that the equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer would take approximately 10,000 years. This dramatic increase in speed compared to all known classical algorithms is an experimental realization of quantum supremacy<sup>8-14</sup> for this specific computational task, heralding a much-anticipated computing paradigm.