Amazon Web Services showed on Thursday a quantum computing chip with new technology that hopes to reduce up to five years to build a commercially useful quantum computer.
The chip, called Ocelot, is a prototype that has only a small fraction of the calculation power necessary to create a useful machine.
AWS, the Amazon cloud computing unit, believes that it has finally found a technology that can become a functional machine, although it has not yet established a date of when it will reach that point.
Quantum computing sweeps the technological world
The announcement of AWS, which coincides with the publication of an article reviewed by pairs in the scientific journal Nature, occurs at a time when quantum computing is sweeping the world of technology.
Quantum computers promise to carry out calculations that would take millions of years to conventional computers and could help scientists develop new materials such as batteries and new medications. But a fundamental component of quantum computers, called Qubit, is fast but fussy and prone to errors.
The scientists established in the 1990s that some of the qubits of a quantum computer could devote themselves to correcting these errors, and the years since then have dedicated themselves to find ways to build physical qubits so that they are sufficient “logical” chbits to do a useful computing work.
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The standard thought of the industry has been that a chip will need around one million physical qubits to produce a useful number of logical qubits.
But AWS said he had built a chip prototype that uses only nine physical qubits to produce a logical qubit that works, thanks to the use of what is known as a “cat” qbit, named for the famous mental experiment of the physicist Erwin Schrödinger to illustrate the principles of quantum mechanics in which an unfortunate cat in a box is alive and dead at the same time.
Oskar Painter, AWS quantum hardware director, said the AWS approach could one day produce useful computers with only 100,000 qubits instead of one million.
“It should allow us to provide between five and 10 times less numbers of physical qubits to implement the correction of errors in a completely climbing machine. So that is the real benefit, ”Painter told Reuters.
Painter said the current chip was built using standard techniques taken from the chips industry and a material called Tantalio, but that AWS and its partners hope to further customize these techniques.
“That’s where I think there will be a lot of innovation and that will be what could really go around the deadlines for development. If we make improvements at the level of materials and processing, this will cause the underlying technology to be much simpler, ”said Painter.
With Reuters information.
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