Two groups of scientists of the Hefeja National Laboratory of Physical Sciences at the Scientific and Technical University of China created two new quantum computing devices on photons and superconductors. As the authors of the work declare, they managed to achieve undoubted quantum superiority, that is, to solve the task that is almost impossible on classical computers. This is reported in several articles published in the magazine PHYSICAL REVIEW Letters.
Both groups headed the Physician Jian-Wei Pan, and in both cases the goal was to calculate the probability of particles at the output of quantum circuits. This task is simple for a regular computer if the scheme contains only a small number of inputs and outputs, but it becomes very complex and even impossible with an increase in this number.
In the first experiment, a Jiuzhang 2.0 photon device was used – a 144-mode interferometer with a number of possible outcomes, equal to 10 in the 43rd degree. Researchers argue that their quantum computer is able to calculate the sampling of the output of 10 in the 24th degree times faster than the classic supercomputer makes it.
In the second job, scientists have created a quantum processor Zuchongzhi based on superconductors, which had 66 qubians, although the calculations were used in the calculations consisting of a maximum of 56 qubians. It turned out that the machine is able to produce sample calculations a thousand times faster than the best supercomputers in the world. In other words, the task of selection of samples of Gaussian bosons, to which the most powerful supercomputer will take eight years, Zuchongzhi can decide for 1.2 hours.
Sampling of Gaussian bosons (or bosonic sample) is a specific computing problem, the solution of which is the distribution of probabilities of particles of particles-bosons (photons in the case of optical quantum calculators) at the quantum circuit outputs.