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Details
- A team led by Daniel Lidar at USC published a study in Physical Review X demonstrating an exponential quantum speedup for a modified version of Simon's problem, using IBM's 127-qubit quantum processors.
- The research was conducted by the University of Southern California (USC) in collaboration with IBM, using IBM Quantum Eagle processors via the cloud.
- The team implemented a variant of Simon's algorithm on near-term noisy quantum hardware, employing error suppression techniques such as dynamical decoupling and measurement error mitigation to achieve the speedup up to 58 qubits.
- Simon's problem is a foundational oracle-based problem that theoretically allows exponential quantum speedup, but this marks the first experimental demonstration without relying on unproven assumptions about classical limitations.
- The experiment ran on two 127-qubit IBM Quantum Eagle processors (ibm_brisbane and ibm_sherbrooke) and showed that for problem sizes beyond 58 qubits, device noise overtook the quantum advantage.
Impact
This milestone provides unconditional evidence of quantum computing's exponential scaling advantage, a critical step toward practical quantum advantage. By demonstrating speedup without conjectures, it validates the promise of near-term quantum algorithms and error mitigation techniques. The results boost confidence in advancing quantum hardware and signal accelerating progress toward real-world, utility-scale applications.
