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Quantum computing is starting to fulfil its promise as a crucial scientific research tool, IBM researchers claim, as the US tech group attempts to quell fears that the technology will fail to match high hopes for it.
The company is due to unveil 10 projects on Monday that point to the power of quantum calculation when twinned with established techniques such as conventional supercomputing, said Dario Gil, its head of research.
“For the first time now we have large enough systems, capable enough systems, that you can do useful technical and scientific work with it,” Gil said in an interview.
The papers presented on Monday are the work of IBM and partners including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Tokyo. They focus mainly on areas such as simulating quantum physics and solving problems in chemistry and materials science.
Expectations that quantum systems would by now be close to commercial uses prompted a wave of funding for the technology in recent years. But signs that business applications are further off than expected have led to warnings of a possible “quantum winter” of waning investor confidence and financial backing.
IBM’s announcements suggest the technology’s main applications have not yet fully extended to the broad range of commercialisable computing tasks many in the field want to see.
“It’s going to take a while before we go from scientific value to, let’s say, business value,” said Jay Gambetta, IBM’s vice-president of quantum. “But in my opinion the difference between research and commercialisation is getting tighter.”
The IBM researchers said recent advances had reinforced their confidence in quantum computing’s longer-run potential, although they made no prediction about when it would enter the commercial mainstream. Instead, they have laid out a 10-year timetable for reaching far more capable, “error-corrected” systems.
Quantum computing harnesses properties of sub-atomic particles that make it possible for them to be in many different states at the same time. This enables quantum machines to carry out large numbers of calculations simultaneously — and potentially solve problems beyond the scope of traditional computers. But the qubits on which the systems are based are unstable and only hold their quantum states for very short periods, introducing errors, or “noise”, into the calculations.
IBM said the new scientific applications for its systems marked an end to the first, experimental, phase of development of the past seven years. This had involved linking enough qubits together to carry out calculations, working out how to control the qubits enough to be able to take practical measurements of their states, and developing the first algorithms.
Quantum computers are in theory well suited to modelling the sub-atomic behaviour of substances. That suggests potential uses in finding novel materials, solving energy problems and discovering new pharmaceuticals.
IBM said researchers were also trying to use quantum systems to find correlations in large bodies of data and to tackle so-called optimisation problems that could help improve business processes.
Despite the lack of headway in commercial uses for the technology, Gil said companies using IBM’s quantum systems as part of their research and development activities are continuing to invest “around the cycles”.
“We continue to see a very healthy industrial base that is investing in the technology.”
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