IBM has made a big announcement about what is believed to be a ‘breakthrough’ in quantum computing. In a recent blog post on IBM’s website, the company claims to have increased the reliability of their quantum computer ‘Eagle’. Researchers have made significant developments in the field of “error mitigation, which will potentially increase the reliability of quantum computers. Quantum computers are sensitive devices and currently lack reliability compared to conventional computers, especially when solving large-scale practical calculations. Problems get more severe when subject to uncertainties called “quantum noise.
“The level of agreement between the quantum and classical computations on such large problems was pretty surprising to me personally,” said Eddins, one of the scientists involved in the experiment. The research article has open access and have been published in the journal Nature.
Quantum noise is the inherent uncertainty and fluctuations in physical systems at the quantum level. It arises due to the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics and affects measurements and operations performed on quantum systems. Quantum noise can limit the precision and accuracy of measurements, introduce errors in quantum computations, and impact the transmission and detection of quantum information. It is an unavoidable characteristic of quantum systems that must be taken into account when dealing with delicate quantum phenomena.
IBM’s 127-qubit Eagle processor is used in this experiment to solve an “ising model” that simulates the behavior of 127 magnetic particles. To overcome the quantum noise, the researchers took a clever approach: they first injected the noise at multiple levels to investigate the effect of noise on the functioning of various processing elements. Researchers extrapolate the results to predict the noise-free solution, as shown below:
Quantum computers can clearly supersede traditional machines in complexity and scale of computation; quantum noise is one of the key challenges to be resolved for industrialization. Computing at the quantum scale is inherently sensitive due to superposition and entanglement principles. Therefore, current developments are a significant milestone in quantum computing.
