7 ms·
An 11-qubit atom processor in silicon with all fidelities from 99.10% to 99.99%
- giuliomagnifico 10mo agoSource and “readable” article: https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/12/17/sqc-study-shows-silicon-based-quantum-processor-can-scale-without-loss-of-fidelity/ https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/12/17/sqc-study-shows-sil...
- refulgentis 10mo agoThis is a PR release meant to accompany the scientific work shown in the actual source / link. I don’t mean to be argumentative, just, would have taken back the time I spent reading it after reading the Nature version. It’s just “go read Nature” + 3 bullet points + anodyne CXO quotes.
- dvh 10mo agoCan it run Shor's?
- Ellipsis753 10mo agoIt should be able to factor 15.
- YesThatTom2 10mo agoSo can a 10 year old. The breakthrough I’m waiting for is factoring something I cant do in my head.
- thrance 10mo agoAnd so can a dog: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf
- bgbntty2 10mo agoApart from being a fun read, I learned that I should be skeptical at papers claiming to have factorized certain numbers. Thanks.
- aipatselarom 10mo agoHow much money or time do they owe you, though?
- iwontberude 10mo agoBut it can’t because the error rate is still too high even for the most trivial examples
- vtomole 10mo agoNo, and Shor's is not a good benchmark for these early quantum computers: https://algassert.com/post/2500 https://algassert.com/post/2500
- sestep 10mo agoThat's a 404; here's a working link: https://algassert.com/post/2500 https://algassert.com/post/2500
- vtomole 10mo agoOops, updated. Thanks!
- rowanG077 10mo agoI'm not sure you can really call it "early days" anymore. The first quantum computer was in 1998. That's 27 years ago.
- vtomole 10mo ago"early days" means that the 1998 computer didn't have qubits that were below the error correction threshold. Now we have hundreds of qubits below threshold. We'll need millions of qubits like these for quantum computing to be useful. If that take decades, this is the "early days" relatively. It's not only early days in hardware, it's early days in practical applications as well: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09124 https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09124
- rowanG077 10mo agoI admit it's early days in practical application. But in hardware definitely not.
- vtomole 10mo agoDepends on what we mean by "early days on hardware". If we mean "we've have been working on this for almost 3 decades. That's a very long time to be working on something!". I agree. If we mean "We just now only have a few logical qubits that outperform their physical counterparts and we'll need thousands of these logical qubits to run anything useful" then we are still in the early days.
- trebligdivad 10mo agoThe engineering at those scales is pretty magical isn't it! Getting a whole bunch of individual atoms exactly where they want them. I wonder what the success rate is - i.e. how many do they build to get one working.
- krastanov 10mo agoUsually they randomly shoot atoms at the substrate and then just search for a spot (among thousands) where it randomly has the configuration they want. Still pretty amazing.
- trebligdivad 10mo agoCan they do that here, they've got quite a few sets of 4/5 atoms which they've interconnected, so that's a lot to get by shotgunning it. I'd assumed they were using something like a STM to nudge the atoms around.
- wrs 10mo agoThe “precision manufacturing” reference in the paper is to this 2012 paper about an STM placement technique. [0] [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nnano.2012.21 https://www.nature.com/articles/nnano.2012.21
- 8note 10mo agohmm. i remember my electron microscopes prof being very excited about his ability to manipulate single atoms exactly where he wants them ~10years ago. id have assumed the holography has gotten more common and able to operate on bigger volumes
- nikanj 10mo agoThis being a research paper, the rate is 1.0. They built one, then tinkered until it worked, then published.
- colesantiago 10mo agoQuantum Computing is a scam. I have not seen any progress or breakthroughs in the QC field at all that are significant. If the only goal for QC is to try to run Shor's algorithm or to "try to break the bitcoin blockchain" then it is worse than useless.
- vtomole 10mo agoQC progress happens super-exponentially: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383233
- colesantiago 10mo agoGraphs aren't telling me anything. What are the real world use cases now, today? The only thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and funding paying for the employment of scientific experimentation, which isn't a real world application. Do I have to wait 15 to 30 years for a series of real world changing breakthroughs that I can already do on a NVIDIA GPU card? That doesn't exponential at all, in fact that sounds very very bearish.
- vtomole 10mo agoThe graphs aren't telling you that QC hardware is not improving at a super-exponential pace? There are no real world use cases today. The hardware is not advanced enough yet, but it's improving exponentially.
- iinnPP 10mo agoI think the point being made is that the graphs don't show real world applications progress. Being 99.9999999% or 0.000001% of the way to a useful application could be argued as no progress given the stated metric. Is there a guarantee that these things can and will work given enough time?
- vtomole 10mo ago
- vtomole 10mo agoSilicon is not one of the leading modalities for quantum computers, but it has progressed a lot in the past ~2-3 years. Here are a few key advancements that have happened as of late: - Intel can now do 2D which means a Surface code can be run on these devices: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14918 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14918 - HRL can now do 2D as well: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08861 https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08861 - They are solving the wiring problem: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-023-01491-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-023-01491-3 - Their interconnects are high fidelity: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09827-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09827-w
- iwontberude 10mo agoAhh yes another quantum processor that creates noise.
- vtomole 10mo agoThis processor is state-of-the-art for silicon quantum computing. It's where modalities like superconducting were 15 years ago, and superconducting does not create noise these days https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y
- iwontberude 10mo agoGate fidelity significantly less than 100 is always noisy, regardless of the qubit itself
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- vtomole 10mo agoSure, I'm not disagreeing that this processor is noisy, just providing enough context to say that it's fine. Historically, these devices improve enough to be under threshold at which point it doesn't matter that they are noisy cause error correction protocols can be run on top of them.
- bobse 10mo ago[dead]
- nikanj 10mo agoQuantum computers can almost, but not quite, factor numbers bigger than 10. Time for git to break all workflows by showing huge alerts if a server is using crypto not proven quantum-proof!
- dyguf 10mo ago[flagged]
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- notepad0x90 10mo agoWhat's closer to practical application these days, photonic/optical computing or quantum computing (silicon or not)?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- twosdai 10mo agoPhotonic computing has a lot of practical applications for signal transfer already. Basically anytime we send a signal across a large fiber optic cable we need to convert signal from light back to electricity and that requires some level of photonic computing. Its used at scale today. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/science/photonics https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/science/photonics However I suspect that you mean photonic computing where a computer on chip device uses photons instead of electrons to communicate. In which case, as far as I know is still research phase.
- notepad0x90 10mo agoThank you, I didn't know that. and you were right, I meant photons instead of electrons being used at the processor logic-gate level.