Successfully developed "Zu Chong No. 2"! China Achieves "Quantum Superiority" on Two Technological Routes

Hefei, October 26 (Xinhua) -- A reporter learned from the University of Science and Technology of China that the research team composed of Pan Jianwei, Zhu Xiaobo, Peng Chengzhi and others of the university, in cooperation with the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has recently successfully built a 66-bit programmable superconducting quantum computing prototype "Zuchong No. 2", and the speed of solving the "quantum random line sampling" task is more than 10 million times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer, which makes China the only one currently achieving on two technical routes." Quantum Superiority" milestone nation.

Quantum computing is considered to be the key technology of the next generation of information revolution, "quantum superiority" like a threshold, refers to when the newborn quantum computing prototype, in a problem of computing power exceeds the strongest traditional computer, it proves that its future has the possibility of multi-party transcendence.

At present, the international academic community is studying quantum computers on multiple technical routes, and superconducting qubits are one of the most promising directions. In May this year, Pan Jianwei, Zhu Xiaobo, Peng Chengzhi and others built a 62-bit superconducting quantum computing prototype "Zu Chong Zhi", which realized programmable two-dimensional quantum walking.

Recently, Pan Jianwei's team adopted a new flip-soldering 3D packaging process to solve the problem of large-scale bit integration and successfully developed the "Zu Chong No. 2". According to the best classical algorithm that has been published so far, the processing speed of "Zuchong-2" to the "quantum random line sampling" problem is more than 10 million times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer.

In 2019 and 2020, the United States and China have successively launched quantum computing prototypes "Planewood" and "Nine Chapters" to achieve "quantum superiority", of which "Nine Chapters" use the optical quantum technology route. The success of Zuchong-2 makes China the only country to achieve "quantum superiority" on two technological routes.

"Reaching 'quantum superiority' marks the second phase of our research, which begins quantum error correction and application exploration." Zhu Xiaobo introduced that the parallel high-fidelity metric subgate manipulation ability and fully programmable ability of "Zuchong No. 2" are expected to find practical applications, including quantum machine learning and quantum chemistry.

On October 25, the results were published in the international academic journals Science Bulletin and Physical Review Letters.