John Timmer stories through Ars Technica: As we speak, a startup referred to as Atom Computing introduced that it has been doing inner testing of a 1,180 qubit quantum laptop and might be making it obtainable to prospects subsequent yr. The system represents a serious step ahead for the corporate, which had solely constructed one prior system based mostly on impartial atom qubits — a system that operated utilizing solely 100 qubits. The error fee for particular person qubit operations is excessive sufficient that it will not be doable to run an algorithm that depends on the total qubit rely with out it failing attributable to an error. But it surely does again up the corporate’s claims that its expertise can scale quickly and offers a testbed for work on quantum error correction. And, for smaller algorithms, the corporate says it will merely run a number of cases in parallel to spice up the prospect of returning the suitable reply. […]
Atom Computing is now utilizing the system internally and plans to open it up for public use subsequent yr. The system has moved from a 10×10 grid to a 35×35 grid, bringing the potential websites for atoms as much as 1,225. Up to now, testing has taken place with as much as 1,180 atoms current, making it the most important machine that anybody has publicly acknowledged (at the very least by way of qubit rely). The qubits are housed in a 12×5 foot field that accommodates the lasers and optics, together with the vacuum system and a little bit of unused house — Atom CEO Rob Hayes quipped that “there’s loads of air inside that field.” It doesn’t, nonetheless, comprise the pc {hardware} that controls the system and its operations. The grid of atoms it is used to create, against this, is just about 100 microns per facet, so it will not pressure the {hardware} to maintain growing the qubit rely.
