The Ledger
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Benjamin: 50-qubit supremacy devices will launch within a year but lack practical utility
“On the other hand, what we believe is about to happen in the coming year is that people will start to bring out qubits, ah, sorry quantum devices that are at or just a little bit over the quantum supremacy threshold. This number, a lot of people are racing to …”
Benjamin: Quantum hardware will soon reach behaviors impossible to classically simulate
“We are now getting on the verge of getting machines that will behave in ways that cannot be predicted, cannot be simulated. We'll be in the regime where we're genuinely discovering how the machine behaves by having one.”
Benjamin: Quantum error-correction threshold is now around 99% fidelity
“So now the threshold is about 99%. If you've got 90, if things work correctly in your quantum computer, 99% of the time, that's the turning point.”
Benjamin: Oxford quantum researchers achieve 99.9% gate fidelity
“But 99.9, which is what the guys here in Oxford can do, is 10 times better than the threshold.”
Benjamin: Kitaev surface code is the go-to quantum computer architecture
“Especially something called the Kataev surface code, which is, at the moment, the go-to solution for how we would build a quantum computer.”
Benjamin: Oxford Holds World Record for Ion Trap Quantum Control
“But the one that I mentioned that we have the world record for the best control, is this thing called an ion trap, which sounds very technical.”
Benjamin: Trapped-ion qubits achieve 50-second to 10-minute coherence times
“So for the superconducting qubits that many researchers are excited, and we do do work on that here in Oxford as well the decay time, the amount of time that can go by before the wonderful zero one superposition just degrades, is the tiniest fraction of a seco…”
Benjamin: 1990s quantum fault-tolerance threshold required 99.9999% fidelity
“And now the threshold when these results were first discovered in the nineties was about 10 parts per million. So I have a many nine, 99.9999 was the kind of level of precision that you would have to have in order to control your quantum computer and take the …”
Benjamin: Topological codes brought quantum fault tolerance down to 99% threshold
“So that was responsible primarily for moving from the multiple nines to the 99% threshold.”
Benjamin: Oxford Has ~200 Quantum Researchers in World-Leading Facility
“Oxford is actually one of the biggest research facilities in the world for quantum. We've got something like 200 people working on this, and so we're working on a bunch of different stuff.”
Benjamin: Simulating 45 qubits classically requires 0.5 petabytes of RAM
“So, 45 qubits required 0.5. This wasn't my work. This was work elsewhere in the community. It required 0.5 half a petabyte of RAM, basically.”
Benjamin: Quantum codebreaking requires millions of physical qubits due to error correction
“Breaking codes is in the category of things that needs at least thousands of qubits. But because it's a big, tough, long-running task, it also needs this whole error correction thing to be going on. And that boosts the size of it, because once you say, oh, wai…”