Breakthrough unveiled in quantum computing

A new photonic quantum computer has begun formal operation in China and has been connected to China Telecom's Tianyan quantum cloud platform, making it accessible online to researchers and developers worldwide, China Telecom Quantum Group said on Monday. 

The Tianyan-P2000 photonic quantum computer was jointly built by the group and Jiuzhang (Jinan) Quantum Technology Co, under the guidance of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Center for Excellence in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics.

"With Tianyan-P2000 online, our platform has become the world's first cloud platform capable of providing quantum advantage services through both photonic and superconducting technologies," said Huang Wenya, a senior product manager of the Tianyan quantum cloud platform.

With the new system, China now offers the country's first online quantum advantage service through a photonic quantum computer, she added.

According to Liu Chunwang, a quantum control engineer at China Telecom Quantum Group, photonic quantum computing can operate at room temperature, a key advantage over superconducting systems, which require extreme cold.

It also offers longer coherence times, has lower noise and operating costs, and can directly interface with existing fiber-optic and quantum communication networks, Liu said.

Coherence time is the duration over which a qubit, the fundamental unit of information in quantum computing, retains its quantum properties, and noise refers to various factors that can affect the accuracy of calculations.

China Telecom Quantum Group said that the system can control 2,682 photons, a key metric of its computational capability. In a benchmark test of quantum computing performance, the device completed a high-complexity computation in just 29 microseconds — a task far beyond the reach of classical supercomputers, which would take an estimated 16 billion years to complete.

According to a simplified explanation by China Science Communication, a national science literacy platform of the China Association for Science and Technology, classical computers process one possibility at a time, while quantum computers can explore many possibilities simultaneously, enabling them to solve certain problems much faster.

The launch of Tianyan-P2000 follows a recent breakthrough by Chinese researchers. In May, a team led by the University of Science and Technology of China published results in Nature magazine on Jiuzhang 4.0, a photonic quantum computing prototype demonstrating a milestone in quantum computing by outperforming classical computers in a specific task. Tianyan-P2000 is based on the same core architecture as Jiuzhang 4.0, developers said.

Tianyan-P2000 now provides computing resources to research institutes, universities and businesses. The platform has launched applications in graph data analysis, drug discovery, spectral computation and machine vision.

The group said the platform has recorded over 50 million visits, processed more than 4 million experimental tasks and served users in more than 60 countries and regions.