IBM Quantum and UC Berkeley Demonstrate Evidence of Quantum Computers' Utility

I’m happy to say that our team at IBM Quantum and research collaborators at UC Berkeley have demonstrated evidence of quantum computers’ utility in experiments evaluating quantum and classical methods for a series of increasingly challenging simulation problems. pic.twitter.com/guwRXtipXS

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023

These are detailed in this published paper this week in Nature https://t.co/prQgVE61Em

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023

Our IBM team used a 127-qubit IBM Quantum Eagle processor (ibm_kyiv https://t.co/VwVW7idXop) to calculate the dynamics of a quantum system that naturally maps to a quantum computer, the quantum Ising model.

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023

The UC Berkeley researchers simulated the same system on classical supercomputers using tensor network methods, currently some of the most powerful classical simulation methods available for approximating large quantum systems.

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023

Using depth reduction techniques to validate the results of the quantum processor at large circuit complexities, it was observed that the quantum results provided more accurate results than the leading classical methods.

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023

This gave confidence on the quantum results of circuits of complexity beyond classical reach, even with depth reduction techniques.

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023

Our team was able to achieve this thanks to the power of error mitigation, which allows us to take results from today’s noisy quantum hardware by modeling the noise and then using this model to undo its effect for certain kinds of problems, such as expectation value calculations.

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023

This isn’t the end of the story but only the beginning. There will continue to be back-and-forth between quantum and classical computation, even with these results shared in this paper.

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023

However, this work demonstrates that we have now entered an era in quantum computing where, thanks to error mitigation and hardware improvements, we can begin tackling problems that push the limits of classical computation.

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023

100+ qubit devices are essential in this work, and I am also excited to share that we will be upgrading our entire quantum fleet towards utility-scale quantum processors over the next year so that our users, clients, and partners will have access to systems.

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023

This is an extraordinary achievement, and one that we hope continues to push our industry forward.

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023

Our mission is to deliver useful quantum computing to the world, and this paper is a clear demonstrable sign that we are well on our way to achieving that goal.

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023

Congratulations to IBM Quantum scientists Youngseok Kim, Andrew Eddins, Kristan Temme and Abhinav Kandala, and to UC Berkeley’s Sajant Anand, Yantao Wu, and Michael Zaletel for the publication of this paper.

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023

I look forward to seeing how we can continue to push quantum computing forward in the era of quantum utility.

— Jay Gambetta (@jaygambetta) June 14, 2023