Google had been wearing the crown of quantum supremacy, but in July 2021, China took that crown as they built a quantum computer that is 1 million times more powerful than Google’s.
A super-advanced 66-qubit quantum computer called “Zuchongxhi”, the new quantum computer by China has now taken over the crown from Goolge’s 54-qubit Sycamore.
Since Google made the fastest quantum computer in 2019, it hasn’t progressed but the the Asian country is consistently producing more powerful quantum processors.
A study published in the journal Physical Review Letters and Science Bulletin, the physicists claim that they’ve build not one but two powerful quantum computers that are far superior than the ones in the US or anywhere in the world. The physicists say that they’ve used superconductor material and a faster unit that uses light photos to achieve inimaginably fast results.
China and Quantum Computers
Back in 2016, China launched the world’s first-ever quantum satellite and the largest land-based quantum network in 2019. At that time, the Asian country was far behind the standards of what the West had achieved. Still, they didn’t stop trying and now they take the crown.
The light-based quantum computer so so fast that it can complete a task in 2 milliseconds while the same task would take up to 30 trillion years for the world’s fasted conventional computer.
There is another version called Jiuzhand 2, build by Pan’s team, that uses photons. Each photon contains 1 qubit. Lu Chaoyand, Lead scientist of Jiuzhang project, says, “we have increased the number of photons from 76 to 113. The new machine is billions of billions of times faster than supercomputers.
An upgrade of a machine that was released some time ago, Zuchongzhi 2 is an enhanced version of that run a task 1 million times more complez than Google Sycamore, according to Pan JianweiI (lead researcher of the project)
Even though they are great breakthroughs in technology, they cannot replace our daily life computers. The reason why is that they are highly task specific and they make a lot of mistakes.
“In the next step we hope to achieve quantum error correction with four to five years of hard work,” said Pan.
He also said that is quite possible to “explore the use of some dedicated quantum computers or quantum simulators to solve some of the most important scientific questions with practical value, based on the technology of quantum error correction.”