The quantum hype cycle is real. That means money is pouring into the research community — potentially including, after its passage last week through the House Science Committee, a $3.6 billion re-authorization of the National Quantum Initiative Act. But plenty of questions still remain about the technology’s basic usefulness as anything but a pathbreaking physics and math experiment, meaning companies working on quantum need to periodically update the public on exactly what it is they’re doing. IBM is one of the biggest corporations in the field, and this morning it rolled out the red carpet for its new Quantum System Two — a modular quantum computer powered by a new IBM-made chip that the company says is far, far more stable than anything seen before in a quantum system. (Stability, of course, is paramount for a technology that rapidly loses its utility when it’s jostled, or warmed, or even used at all.) The company’s new chip is called the “Heron,” the latest in a long line of bird-themed nicknames for their quantum line. I met with Dario Gil, IBM senior vice president and director of research, and Jay Gambetta, the company’s vice president of quantum computing, several weeks ago to see the System Two in person at their laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York. There, they described in detail how the Heron chip is the culmination of years of effort toward improving “error correction,” or the process of fighting decoherence. Gambetta described its development as a long-term project aimed, quite self-consciously, at pushing the field forward and cementing IBM’s status at its forefront. (For a detailed technical explanation of IBM’s strides with the Heron, see this Ars Technica explainer and conversation with Gambetta.) One major problem in the quantum-computing ecosystem is that the miraculous applications that some promise — the end of cryptography, instant development of miracle drugs, climate change reversal — are still far, far in the future. That means companies in the private sector that want to make the case for quantum investment while keeping expectations in check have to find a delicate balance between the technology’s current-day uses and how they might realistically build a path to a quantum-powered tomorrow. Right now that means using quantum computers mostly for research, like a recent quantum experiment at the University of Washington that demonstrated how quantum could potentially be uniquely useful in answering questions about how matter interacts at the atomic level. “You’ve probably heard of quantum supremacy, or quantum advantage,” said Jay Gambetta, IBM’s vice president of quantum computing, during our tour of the Yorktown Heights laboratory, referring to the idea that quantum computers will someday have uses where they clearly surpass the power of classical computers. “All of this gets complicated, comparing apples and oranges. We said, let’s just simplify it and focus on scientists and what they’re able to explore [with quantum computers].” Sergio Gago Huerta, head of quantum at Moody’s and author of the Quantum Pirates newsletter, is one of the industry watchers who are optimistic about IBM’s proposed “road map” for more usable quantum computers — which culminates in 2033 with its proposal for the world’s first quantum supercomputer, nicknamed “Blue Jay.” Still, he’s looking for more detail on how it plans to get there. “In general, I think it is a great step towards achieving quantum advantage in the future,” Gago Huerta said. “But we believe that many of the computational problems we face may be difficult to encode in parallelized systems like those… The updated roadmap gives us a fantastic baseline to work with, although I wished it had more information.” For his part, Gil described the discovery and application of quantum computing as “like gravity,” an inevitable outcome where the only salient question is who might perfect it first — something he says the U.S. has the potential to do with the appropriate support from Washington. “We need a moment of vision and leadership, for someone to say, we're going to do it, and I want it by this day, and with this data, and we’re spending this many dollars,” Gil said. “We’re in a moment in quantum where that level of ambition is needed, to say that we're going to do it and no one company or one institution will be doing it alone.”
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