[ExI] Honeywell Just Released Details About How Its Quantum Computer Works

John Grigg possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com
Tue Apr 20 13:15:45 UTC 2021


How important is quantum computing in regards to developing true AGI?

"Engineering giant Honeywell burst into the quantum computing
<https://singularityhub.com/tag/computing/> race out of left field last
year. Now the company has provided the first concrete details of how its
device works in a peer-reviewed journal.

Unlike its main rivals Google and IBM, who rely on superconducting qubits,
Honeywell is using trapped ions to power its device. The technology has a
long pedigree—most of the earliest quantum computing experiments relied on
this approach—but difficulties in scaling devices beyond a few qubits saw
it eclipsed by alternatives.

The technique relies on encoding information in the quantum states of
charged particles called ions, which are suspended in a vacuum using
electromagnetic fields. These qubits have a number of advantages over their
superconducting cousins: they maintain their quantum states far longer,
they’re less error-prone, and they can easily interact with many qubits
rather than only their closest neighbors.

But there are only so many ions one can confine to a single trap, which
puts an upper limit on how big conventional devices could be. And while
they can interact with many qubits, they do so considerably slower than
superconducting devices.

Last March, Honeywell burst onto the quantum computing scene by claiming to
have solved these problems
<https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2020/03/honeywell-achieves-breakthrough-that-will-enable-the-worlds-most-powerful-quantum-computer>
and created the most powerful quantum computer to date. Now they’ve finally
lifted the lid on exactly how they did that in a paper published in *Nature*
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03318-4>*.*

The company’s machine builds on a design first proposed in 2002
<https://physicsworld.com/a/quantum-computer-based-on-shuttling-ions-is-built-by-honeywell/>,
which solves many of the limitations of the technology by shuttling ions
around. The device reported in *Nature* features up to six qubits made of
ytterbium-171 atoms arranged in a line.

However, unlike in more conventional trapped-ion computers, they aren’t
held in place using a single static electric field. The device’s 198
electrodes can be controlled independently to dynamically vary the field,
which allows the qubits to be shifted up and down to interact with each
other.

This makes it possible for all the qubits to interact, which has major
implications for the complexity of the algorithms the machine can
implement. The importance of this kind of connectivity was actually first
brought to the fore by Honeywell’s rival, IBM, when it introduced a measure
called quantum volume
<https://singularityhub.com/2019/03/13/ibm-introduces-quantum-volume-to-track-progress-towards-the-quantum-age/>
to help track progress in the field.

Simply adding qubits to your device is only helpful if they are not too
error-prone and can actually do useful work. So IBM researchers suggested
that the true test of a quantum computer is the size of the most
complicated circuit a device can implement to a certain standard of
reliability.

The resulting metric is called quantum volume, and last year IBM achieved a
volume of 64 on its 27-qubit processor. But Honeywell shows in the paper
that it can match that figure using just six qubits thanks to the device’s
much greater connectivity, and also its low error rates.

Since the research was carried out, the company has brought the number of
qubits in its device up to 10
<https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/commercial-iontrap-quantum-computers-showing-rapid-scaleup>,
which it says can now achieve a quantum volume of 512, though the results
have yet to be peer-reviewed. The company also outlined how it plans to
scale its set up to far larger numbers of qubits.

Its current linear system has capacity for up to 40 qubits, but the company
is already testing a successor device that looks more like a race track and
could hold considerably more. The next stage will be to create a processor
featuring a grid of traps and then integrating many of these grids
together."

https://singularityhub.com/2021/04/19/honeywell-just-released-details-about-how-its-quantum-computer-works/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20210420/aa5a4efe/attachment.htm>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list