Chao-Yang Lu, a quantum physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and his chums have created a light-based quantum computing experiment. It’s effectively a maze for identical photons to travel through depending on the photons’ quantum properties.
The machine’s photon detectors could help figure out where the randomly distributed photons end up. Which is a complex mathematical problem. And that is the kind of math problem that a classical computer bogs down over as the number of distributed photons increases.
Led by quantum physicist Jian-Wei Pan at the University of Science and Technology of China, the group built a large tabletop setup consisting of lasers as the light source and beam splitters to help create the individual photons, along with hundreds of prisms and dozens of mirrors to provide the randomized paths for the photons to travel.
That allowed the team’s quantum computing hardware, named Jiŭzhāng, to detect 43 photons on average during experimental runs lasting 200 seconds. By comparison, the world’s third-fastest classical supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight, would require two entire days to calculate the distribution for 50 photons, according to the team’s paper, published in a recent issue of the journal Science.
The Chinese research differs from the Google team’s 54-qubit quantum computer called Sycamore relied on a completely different architecture based on superconducting metal loops. Quantum computing hardware based on arrays of such superconducting qubits has gained traction among tech giants such as Google, IBM, and Intel.
The Chinese team’s demonstration of boson sampling remains a fairly specialised experiment designed for proving quantum computational advantage over classical computing rather than having immediate practical applications. That makes its uses far more limited for now than those of Google’s Sycamore quantum processor, which is designed to be programmable for many different applications.
The issue is that while the hardware is a great demonstration it is not yet programmable and will never run Chrysalis.
