Amazon joins the quantum race with new series of quantum chip

Within a few months, Amazon has announced a quantum computing breakthrough, making it the third big tech corporation to do so.

This technology holds the potential for immense processing power, though it still faces significant technical challenges. By making them error-free, the chip seeks to address one of the main problems with quantum computing.

According to Amazon, their research indicates that real quantum computers may be closer than we thought, especially in light of other recent developments in the field.

The team at the California Institute of Technology’s AWS Center for Quantum Computing created Ocelot, which represents a major advancement in the development of fault-tolerant quantum computers.

These computers could solve challenging issues that modern conventional computers are unable to manage in both scientific and commercial domains.

Amazon’s powered chip: Cat qubit

A cat qubit is a kind of quantum bit (qubit) that encodes quantum information using Schrödinger cat states, which are superpositions of coherent states.

In order to characterize particles that exist in numerous states simultaneously, these states are called after Schrödinger’s thought experiment, which shows a cat that is both alive and dead.

Cat qubits have the potential to improve error correction in quantum computing. Decoherence and other quantum noise make traditional qubits extremely prone to errors.

However, by utilizing their macroscopic quantum features, cat qubits can be designed to be more resilient to specific kinds of errors, like bit-flips. Their capacity to exist in discrete, stable states that are less vulnerable to environmental disruptions accounts for their resilience.

Despite these developments, researchers still have a lot of work ahead to enable cat qubits for use in large-scale quantum computers. Ongoing research aims to overcome technological obstacles and unlock the full potential of cat qubits for future quantum computing applications.

Major challenges of Quantum computing

Because quantum systems are extremely sensitive to their surroundings, errors can arise from decoherence, a state in which quantum behavior deteriorates. One of the biggest challenges is keeping qubit stability long enough for calculations.

Increasing the number of qubits while controlling their interactions is necessary to construct large-scale quantum computers. Maintaining system coherence becomes challenging as a result of the control and error correction complications brought about by this scale.

Extremely accurate measurement and control are necessary for quantum systems. It is theoretically challenging to generate and coordinate many electrical signals with great timing resolution, particularly as the number of qubits increases.

Although it necessitates more qubits and processing expense, quantum error correction is crucial. Researchers are still working to develop effective error-correcting codes that preserve the benefits of quantum computing.