D-Wave Demonstrates Quantum Simulation of Exotic Magnetism

D-Wave Systems Inc., the leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services, today published a milestone study in collaboration with scientists at Google, demonstrating a computational performance advantage, increasing with both simulation size and problem hardness, to over 3 million times that of corresponding classical methods. Notably, this work was achieved on a practical application with real-world implications, simulating the topological phenomena behind the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics. This performance advantage, exhibited in a complex quantum simulation of materials, is a meaningful step in the journey toward applications advantage in quantum computing.

Above- Fully-programmable annealing quantum computer demonstrates 3 million times speed-up over classical CPU in a practical application

“This work is the clearest evidence yet that quantum effects provide a computational advantage in D-Wave processors,” said Dr. Andrew King, principal investigator for this work at D-Wave. “Tying the magnet up into a topological knot and watching it escape has given us the first detailed look at dynamics that are normally too fast to observe. What we see is a huge benefit in absolute terms, with the scaling advantage in temperature and size that we would hope for. This simulation is a real problem that scientists have already attacked using the algorithms we compared against, marking a significant milestone and an important foundation for future development. This wouldn’t have been possible today without D-Wave’s lower noise processor.”

“The search for quantum advantage in computations is becoming increasingly lively because there are special problems where genuine progress is being made. These problems may appear somewhat contrived even to physicists, but in this paper from a collaboration between D-Wave Systems, Google, and Simon Fraser University, it appears that there is an advantage for quantum annealing using a special purpose processor over classical simulations for the more ‘practical’ problem of finding the equilibrium state of a particular quantum magnet,” said Prof. Dr. Gabriel Aeppli, professor of physics at ETH Zürich and EPF Lausanne, and head of the Photon Science Division of the Paul Scherrer Institute. “This comes as a surprise given the belief of many that quantum annealing has no intrinsic advantage over path integral Monte Carlo programs implemented on classical processors.”

he scientific achievements presented in Nature Communications further underpin D-Wave’s ongoing work with world-class customers to develop over 250 early quantum computing applications, with a number piloting in production applications, in diverse industries such as manufacturing, logistics, pharmaceutical, life sciences, retail and financial services. In September 2020, D-Wave brought its next-generation Advantage™ quantum system to market via the Leap™ quantum cloud service. The system includes more than 5,000 qubits and 15-way qubit connectivity, as well as an expanded hybrid solver service capable of running business problems with up to one million variables.

Nature Communications- Scaling advantage over path-integral Monte Carlo in quantum simulation of geometrically frustrated magnets

Abstract

The promise of quantum computing lies in harnessing programmable quantum devices forpractical applications such as efficient simulation of quantum materials and condensedmatter systems. One important task is the simulation of geometrically frustrated magnets inwhich topological phenomena can emerge from competition between quantum and thermalfluctuations. Here we report on experimental observations of equilibration in such simula-tions, measured on up to 1440 qubits with microsecond resolution. By initializing the systemin a state with topological obstruction, we observe quantum annealing (QA) equilibrationtimescales in excess of one microsecond. Measurements indicate a dynamical advantage inthe quantum simulation compared with spatially local update dynamics of path-integralMonte Carlo (PIMC). The advantage increases with both system size and inverse tem-perature, exceeding a million-fold speedup over an efficient CPU implementation. PIMC is aleading classical method for such simulations, and a scaling advantage of this type wasrecently shown to be impossible in certain restricted settings. This is therefore an importantpiece of experimental evidence that PIMC does not simulate QA dynamics even for sign-problem-free Hamiltonians, and that near-term quantum devices can be used to acceleratecomputational tasks of practical relevance.

SOURCES- Dwave Systems, Nature Communications
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

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