Even in its simplified form, however, it\u2019s still a model of a quantum system, with all the computational complexity that comes with that. So the Quantinuum team modeled a few systems that classical computers struggle with. One was simply looking at a larger grid of atoms than most classical simulations have done; another expanded the grid in an additional dimension, modeling layers of a material. Perhaps the most complicated simulation involved what happens when a laser pulse of the right wavelength hits a superconductor at room temperature, an event that briefly induces a superconducting state.<\/p>\n
And the system produced results, even without error correction. \u201cIt\u2019s maybe a technical point, but I think it\u2019s very important technical point, which is [that] the circuits that we ran, they all had errors,\u201d Dreyer told Ars. \u201cMaybe on the average of three or so errors, and for some reason, that is not very fully understood for this application, it doesn\u2019t matter. You still get almost the perfect result in some of these cases.\u201d<\/p>\n
That said, he also indicated that having higher-fidelity hardware would help the team do a better job of putting the system in a ground state or running the simulation for longer. But those will have to wait for future hardware.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s next<\/p>\n