Amazon Web Services on Thursday debuted its prototype quantum chip, the Ocelot, making headway in the race to develop functional quantum computers.
“What makes Ocelot different and special is the way it approaches the fundamental challenge we have with quantum computers, and that is the errors that they’re susceptible to,” Oskar Painter, the director of quantum hardware at AWS told Business Insider.
Amazon, in research published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature, says the Ocelot represents a breakthrough in error correction and scalability — two key issues that have long slowed advancement in the field. The Ocelot prototype demonstrated the potential to increase efficiency in quantum error correction by up to 90% compared to conventional approaches, the company says.
“And that efficiency is something on the order of a factor of five to 10x so it’s a pretty significant reduction,” Painter said. “We still have about a factor of a billion to reduce the error rate — so that it’s a huge gap — but it turns out that quantum error correction is up to the challenge, and it turns out that we eventually can bridge this massive gap.”
Schrödinger’s qubits
Quantum computing is a growing field of technology that combines computer science, math, and quantum mechanics. It relies on units of information called qubits rather than the binary bits used in classical computing.
Qubits hold more information than binary bits and can exist in multiple states simultaneously. However, they are unstable, difficult to measure, and require specific conditions — such as low light or extremely cold environments — to reliably replicate results without errors, which has slowed progress in the field for years.
But when they behave predictably at a large enough scale, qubits enable quantum computers to solve more complex calculations more quickly than classical computers can. Researchers in the field agree that computations solvable through quantum computing could help discover new drugs, promote sustainable food growth in harsh climates, develop new chemical compounds, or break our current encryption methods, among other outcomes.
Amazon said the Ocelot chip uses a kind of qubit technology called cat qubits, named after the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. This technology intrinsically suppresses certain forms of errors, simplifying and reducing the quantum error correction required to build a full-fledged quantum computer, a spokesperson said.
An Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider the chip has a unique architecture that integrates the cat qubit technology and additional quantum error correction components into the chip that can be manufactured using processes borrowed from the electronics industry.
A quantum ‘tipping point’
Before fully-fledged and functional quantum computers can become commercially useful, Painter and other quantum researchers agree they must make more progress in error reduction and scalability. While Amazon’s new chip doesn’t mean commercially useful quantum computers are in production now, it’s the latest in a series of recent advancements in the field that has galvanized the industry and suggests commercial adoption will come sooner than expected.
Rob Schoelkopf, cofounder and chief scientist of Quantum Circuits, said Amazon’s research results “highlight how more efficient error correction is key to ensuring viable quantum computing. ” He described the company’s progress as “a good step toward exploring and preparing for future roadmaps” in further developing quantum technology.
Amazon’s announcement comes about a week after Microsoft unveiled its quantum chip, the Majorana 1. Microsoft says its chip is powered by a new state of matter and allows for more stable, scalable, and simplified quantum computing.
Similarly, Google in December announced its quantum chip, Willow, which the company says can perform a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes. It’s a task that would take the current fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years to complete — a timeframe that exceeds the age of the universe.
“We really are at a very exciting time in quantum computing, and you’re hearing a lot about it because this is a real tipping point,” Painter said.
Who is in the lead?
Sankar Das Sarma, a theoretical condensed matter physicist at the University of Maryland’s Joint Quantum Institute, told Business Insider Amazon’s Ocelot chip is a “more conventional superconducting chip, perhaps similar to the ones developed by Google and IBM,” than the one recently unveiled by Microsoft — though he added it’s too soon to say which company is ahead in their findings.
“The MSFT work is based on topological Majorana zero modes, which also has a superconductor, but in a radically different manner,” Das Sarma wrote in an email to BI. “In particular, the MSFT device, if it works correctly, is protected topologically with minimal need for error correction, whereas the AWS claim seems to be that they have made some improvement in the conventional error correction schemes. The two approaches are very different.”
Researchers in the field are closely monitoring Amazon’s and other companies’ advancements, hoping to prove that quantum technology will become commercially viable sooner than anticipated. In January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggested we were still 20 years away from the technology being “very useful,” sending quantum stocks tumbling.
Troy Nelson, the chief technology officer at Lastwall, a cybersecurity provider of quantum resilient technology, told Business Insider that each company’s announcement represents another building block that the industry will use along the way to a functioning quantum computer.
“There’s lots of challenges ahead. What Amazon gained in error correction — and it has led to some new scientific knowledge and discoveries in error correction — was a trade-off for the complexity and the sophistication of the control systems and the readouts from the chip,” Nelson said. “We’re still in prototype days, and we still have multiple years to go, but they’ve made a great leap forward.”
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