A Chinese research team led by CAS member PAN Jianwei has successfully designed a 62-qubit programmable superconducting quantum processor with the largest number of superconducting qubits so far in the world. The processor, which is named Zu Chongzhi after the noted 5th century Chinese mathematician and astronomer, has achieved two-dimensional programmable quantum walks on the system, a major milestone in the field.
According to experts, this achievement greatly advances the possibility of universal quantum computing through a two-dimensional quantum walk.
The study was conducted by a research team from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and was published in Science magazine, one of the top academic journals in the world, on May 6, 2021.
The team designed and produced an 8×8 two-dimensional square superconducting qubit array composed of 62 functional qubits and used this device to demonstrate high-fidelity, single- and two-particle quantum walks.
Such a device can be applied to universal quantum computing, which means that any computing task can be done in this manner.
This study is a major milestone, bringing future larger scale quantum applications closer to realization on noisy, intermediate-scale quantum processors.
The development of quantum computers, one of the major challenges on the global forefront of science and technology, has become the focus of competition among countries around the world.
Superconducting quantum computing is among the most promising candidates for scalable quantum computing. Its core objective is to synchronously increase the number of integrated qubits and improve the performance of superconducting qubits so as to achieve exponential acceleration in the processing speed of specific problems and finally apply it in practice.
Two-dimensional programmable quantum-walks-based quantum computing have potential applications in quantum search algorithms, general quantum computing and other fields, and will be an important direction for subsequent development.
