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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)

Comparing the architectures of the first programmable quantum computers

Norbert M. Linke, Dmitri Maslov, Martin Roetteler, Shantanu Debnath, Caroline Figgatt, K. A. Landsman, Kenneth Wright, Christopher R. Monroe

Published Jun 1, 2017• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Summary form only given. Last year saw the first quantum computers realized that can be programmed from a high level user interface to run arbitrary quantum algorithms [1, 2]. While these devices are still small in scale, only comprising a handful of qubits each, they nevertheless allow the implementation of quantum circuits in a way that is basically blind to the underlying hardware itself. This constitutes a new level of development in quantum computer technology for the two leading approaches, trapped atomic ions [1] and superconducting circuits [3]. It also gives us the opportunity to test quantum computers irrespective of their particular physical implementation for the first time. With multiple companies (IBM, Google, Microsoft, as well as several start-ups) aiming for a larger scale device of commercial viability in the near future, benchmarking quantum computers becomes a crucial pursuit and this work is a step in that direction. Our device consists of five171Yb+atomic ions trapped in a Paul trap [1]. Each provides a pristine “atomic clock” qubit in its atomic structure that can be manipulated with laser light and read out via state-dependent fluorescence. Two-qubit gates between any pair are implemented via laser-mediated interaction of qubits through the normal modes of motion in the trap [4] making it a fully connected system.

DOI
10.1109/cleoe-eqec.2017.8087391

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Summary form only given. Last year saw the first quantum computers realized that can be programmed from a high level user interface to run arbitrary quantum algorithms [1, 2]. While these devices are still small in scale, only comprising a handful of qubits each, they nevertheless allow the implementation of quantum circuits in a way that is basically blind to the underlying hardware itself. This constitutes a new level of development in quantum computer technology for the two leading approaches, trapped atomic ions [1] and superconducting circuits [3]. It also gives us the opportunity to test quantum computers irrespective of their particular physical implementation for the first time. With multiple companies (IBM, Google, Microsoft, as well as several start-ups) aiming for a larger scale device of commercial viability in the near future, benchmarking quantum computers becomes a crucial pursuit and this work is a step in that direction. Our device consists of five171Yb+atomic ions trapped in a Paul trap [1]. Each provides a pristine “atomic clock” qubit in its atomic structure that can be manipulated with laser light and read out via state-dependent fluorescence. Two-qubit gates between any pair are implemented via laser-mediated interaction of qubits through the normal modes of motion in the trap [4] making it a fully connected system.
We run a selection of algorithms on two state-of-the-art 5-qubit quantum computers that are based on different technology platforms. One is a publicly accessible superconducting transmon device (www. RESEARCH: ibm.com/ibm-q) with limited connectivity, and the other is a fully connected trapped-ion system. Even though the two systems have different native quantum interactions, both can be programed in a way that is blind to the underlying hardware, thus allowing a comparison of identical quantum algorithms between different physical systems. We show that quantum algorithms and circuits that use more connectivity clearly benefit from a better-connected system of qubits. Although the quantum systems here are not yet large enough to eclipse classical computers, this experiment exposes critical factors of scaling quantum computers, such as qubit connectivity and gate expressivity. In addition, the results suggest that codesigning particular quantum applications with the hardware itself will be paramount in successfully using quantum computers in the future.
Quantum computers can solve certain problems more efficiently compared to conventional classical methods. In the endeavor to build a quantum computer, several competing platforms have emerged that can implement certain quantum algorithms using a few qubits. However, the demonstrations so far have been done usually by tailoring the hardware to meet the requirements of a particular algorithm implemented for a limited number of instances. Although such proof of principal implementations are important to verify the working of algorithms on a physical system, they further need to have the potential to serve as a general purpose quantum computer allowing the flexibility required for running multiple algorithms and be scaled up to host more qubits. Here we demonstrate a small programmable quantum computer based on five trapped atomic ions each of which serves as a qubit. By optically resolving each ion we can individually address them in order to perform a complete set of single-qubit and fully connected two-qubit quantum gates and alsoperform efficient individual qubit measurements. We implement a computation architecture that accepts an algorithm from a user interface in the form of a standard logic gate sequence and decomposes it into fundamental quantum operations that are native to the hardware using a set of compilation instructions that are defined within the software. These operations are then effected through a pattern of laser pulses that perform coherent rotations on targeted qubits in the chain. The architecture implemented in the experiment therefore gives us unprecedented flexibility in the programming of any quantum algorithm while staying blind to the underlying hardware. As a demonstration we implement the Deutsch-Jozsa and Bernstein-Vazirani algorithms on the five-qubit processor and achieve average success rates of 95 and 90 percent, respectively. We also implement a five-qubit coherent quantum Fourier transform and examine its performance in the period finding and phase estimation protocol. We find fidelities of 84 and 62 percent, respectively. While maintaining the same computation architecture the system can be scaled to more ions using resources that scale favorably (O(N^2)) with the number of qubits N.
Abstract The past few years have witnessed the concrete and fast spreading of quantum technologies for practical computation and simulation. In particular, quantum computing platforms based on either trapped ions or superconducting qubits have become available for simulations and benchmarking, with up to few tens of qubits that can be reliably initialized, controlled, and measured. The present Review aims at giving a comprehensive outlook on the state‐of‐the‐art capabilities offered from these near‐term noisy devices as universal quantum simulators, that is, programmable quantum computers potentially able to calculate the time evolution of many physical models. First, a pedagogic overview on the basic theoretical background pertaining digital quantum simulations is given, with a focus on hardware‐dependent mapping of spin‐type Hamiltonians into the corresponding quantum circuit as a key initial step toward simulating more complex models. Then, the main experimental achievements obtained in the last decade are reviewed, focusing on the digital quantum simulation of such spin models by employing two leading quantum architectures. Their performances are compared, and future challenges are outlined, also in view of prospective hybrid technologies, towards the ultimate goal of reaching the long‐sought quantum advantage for the simulation of complex many‐body models in the physical sciences.
The development of quantum computing systems has been a staple of academic research since the mid-1990s when the first proposal for physical platforms were proposed using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and Ion-Trap hardware. These first proposals were very basic, essentially consisting of identifying a physical qubit (two-level quantum system) that could be isolated and controlled to achieve universal quantum computation. Over the past thirty years, the nature of quantum architecture design has changed significantly and the scale of investment, groups and companies involved in building quantum computers has increased exponentially. Architectural design for quantum computers examines systems at scale: fully error-corrected machines, potentially consisting of millions if not billions of physical qubits. These designs increasingly act as blueprints for academic groups and companies and are becoming increasingly more detailed, taking into account both the nature and operation of the physical qubits themselves and also peripheral environmental and control infrastructure that is required for each physical system. In this paper, several architectural structures that I have worked on will be reviewed, each of which has been adopted by either a national quantum computing program or a quantum startup.
We present progress on the construction and operation of a room- temperature quantum computer built with trapped atomic ion qubits. Based on the technological underpinnings of atomic clocks that define time, atomic qubits are standards of quantum information because they are all identical. They present a fundamentally scalable approach to quantum computation where interactions can be faithfully replicated and measured with near-perfect efficiency. Moreover, the connection among atomic ion qubits are forged from external laser beams and mediated by the Coulomb repulsion between them, and hence behave as a fully reconfigurable quantum circuit, much like an FPGA in classical computation. We further discuss paths to scaling using demonstrated technologies that are unique to this class of quantum computation devices. This flexibility will likely allow ion trap quantum computers to express the superset of all known quantum computation operations, and thus efficiently target any type of application that arises.
Abstract The first generation of quantum computers are on the horizon, fabricated from quantum hardware platforms that may soon be able to tackle certain tasks that cannot be performed or modelled with conventional computers. These quantum devices will not likely be universal or fully programmable, but special-purpose processors whose hardware will be tightly co-designed with particular target applications. Trapped atomic ions are a leading platform for first-generation quantum computers, but they are also fundamentally scalable to more powerful general purpose devices in future generations. This is because trapped ion qubits are atomic clock standards that can be made identical to a part in 1015, and their quantum circuit connectivity can be reconfigured through the use of external fields, without modifying the arrangement or architecture of the qubits themselves. In this forward-looking overview, we show how a modular quantum computer with thousands or more qubits can be engineered from ion crystals, and how the linkage between ion trap qubits might be tailored to a variety of applications and quantum-computing protocols.