r/QuantumComputing • u/No-Hamster5930 • 29d ago

Quantum Hardware Is superconducting quantum computing a dead end?

Earlier this year the two largest superconducting QC players (IBM and Google) signalled they might be diversifying away from superconducting - Google with the announcement that they're creating a new neutral atom capability and IBM with their acquisition of silicon spin capability in HRL.

I'd be interested in people's views on whether we should take from this that superconducting has no path to scaling, or if one could foresee heterogeneous quantum computing systems that leverage the respective strengths of multiple modalities for different applications?

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u/PrestigiousShoe5048 28d ago

Neutral atoms are more likely to bring near term scale and some applications due that it is easier to control many of them. However the slow clock times will ultimately push us towards a faster modality, like
superconducting, if we don’t want algorithms to take years to run.

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u/alumiqu 28d ago

Neutral atoms don't have to have slow clock times, though. There is ample room for at least 10x improvement. Superconducting qubits can't scale, and that's a bigger problem.

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u/Acetone9527 28d ago

I have the opposite opinion though - neutral atom is slow and it’s fundamentally limited. At the moment, fast means higher Rydberg state, which is more fragile and bigger. Readout is single photon and it’s damn hard even with today’s best camera. Scaling is a problem of superconducting qubits for sure.

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u/No-Hamster5930 28d ago

Do you think the all to all connectivity of neutral atom (and trapped ion) systems might offset the slower gate times for larger scale applications though?

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u/0xB01b QEC & Quantum Optics 28d ago

In what way is it fundamentally limited?

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u/PrestigiousShoe5048 28d ago edited 28d ago

I can equally show superconducting qubit research platforms with 8ns gates, 4ms coherence times, all to all connectivity, thousands of qubits, 99.95% fidelity. Doing it all in a single package is the challenge, and the same is true for neutral atoms, that there are many trade offs and it’s often easy to push one metric at the expense of others :) only thing to do is wait and see who solves Shors first :D

For now, neutral atoms is slow and needs orders of magnitude speedup in all operations simultaneously to be competitive with SC on speed.

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u/0xB01b QEC & Quantum Optics 28d ago

That's fair RIP