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IBM researchers say quantum computing is beginning to fulfill its promise as a crucial scientific research tool, as the US technology giant seeks to allay fears that the technology will fail to live up to high hopes.
The company will unveil ten projects on Monday that point to the power of quantum computation in conjunction with established techniques such as conventional supercomputing, said research director Dario Gil.
“For the first time, we now have systems that are large enough and powerful enough to be able to do useful engineering and scientific work,” Gil said in an interview.
The papers presented Monday are the work of IBM and partners including Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Tokyo. They focus primarily on areas such as simulating quantum physics and solving problems in chemistry and materials science.
The expectation that quantum systems could now be used commercially has triggered a wave of funding for the technology in recent years. But signs that business applications are further away than expected have led to warnings of a possible “quantum winter” with dwindling investor confidence and financial support.
IBM’s announcements suggest that the technology’s main applications have not yet fully expanded to the broad range of commercializable computing tasks that many in the field desire.
“It’s going to take a while for us to move from scientific value to, let’s say, business value,” said Jay Gambetta, IBM’s vice president of quantum technology. “But in my opinion the difference between research and commercialization is getting narrower.”
IBM researchers said recent advances had increased their confidence in the long-term potential of quantum computing, although they made no prediction about when it would enter the commercial mainstream. Instead, they have set a 10-year timeline for developing far more powerful, “error-corrected” systems.
Quantum computing exploits properties of subatomic particles that allow them to be in many different states at the same time. This allows quantum machines to perform large numbers of calculations simultaneously – and potentially solve problems beyond the capabilities of traditional computers. But the qubits on which the systems are based are unstable and only maintain their quantum states for very short periods of time, leading to errors or “noise” in the calculations.
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IBM said the new scientific applications of its systems marked the end of the first experimental development phase over the past seven years. This involved linking enough qubits together to perform calculations, figuring out how to control the qubits to the point where practical measurements of their states could be made, and developing the first algorithms.
Quantum computers are theoretically well suited to modeling the subatomic behavior of substances. This suggests potential uses in finding novel materials, solving energy problems, and discovering new drugs.
According to IBM, researchers also sought to use quantum systems to find correlations in large amounts of data and address so-called optimization problems that could help improve business processes.
Despite the lack of progress in commercializing the technology, Gil said companies that use IBM’s quantum systems as part of their research and development activities continue to invest “around the cycles.”
“We continue to see a very healthy industrial base investing in the technology.”