Karmela Padavic-Callaghan in Nature:
As a contender in the race to build an error-free quantum supercomputer, IBM has been taking a different tack than its most direct competitors. Now, the firm has unveiled two new quantum computers, called Nighthawk and Loon, that may validate its approach and could provide innovations needed to make the next generation of these devices truly useful.
IBM’s quantum supercomputer design is modular and relies on developing new ways to connect superconducting qubits within and across different quantum computer units. When the firm first debuted it, some researchers questioned the practicality of these connections, says Jay Gambetta at IBM. He says it was as if people were saying to the IBM team: “‘You’re in theory land, you cannot realise that.’ And [now] we’re going to show that [to be] wrong.”
Within Loon, each qubit is connected to six others and those connections can “break the plane”, which means they don’t just travel across a chip but can move vertically as well, a capability that no other superconducting quantum computer has had so far.
More here.
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