D-Wave Systems of Canada, in partnership with Google scientists, demonstrated that their quantum computer could activate materials 3 million times faster than conventional computers.

The experiment, which was carried out on D-Wave processors, revealed that performance improved as simulation size and problem complexity increased, and it represented the largest simulations carried by any quantum computer to date.

“This performance advantage, demonstrated in a complex quantum simulation of materials, is a major step toward quantum computing applications advantage,” D-Wave said in a statement.

The problem was solved through a real-world calculation by 2016 Nobel Laureates in Physics who investigated exotic magnetism, a phenomenon that exists in quantum magnetic systems.

The results were published in the paper ‘Scaling advantage over path-integral Monte Carlo in quantum simulation of geometrically frustrated magnets.’

Using artificial spins, researchers programmed a D-Wave device to model a two-dimensional frustrated quantum magnet. In their Nobel Prize-winning work, Vadim Berezinskii, J. Michael Kosterlitz, and David Thouless identified the action of this magnet.

In the 1970s, they predicted a new state of matter with nontrivial topological properties.

“Tying the magnet in a topological knot and watching it escape has given us the first thorough look at dynamics that are usually too quick to observe,” said Andrew King, D-principal Wave’s investigator.

“This is the clearest proof yet that quantum effects in D-Wave processors have a computational advantage.”

Source: www.thehindu.com