IBM reveals 120-qubit Nighthawk chip

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IBM

IBM said on Wednesday that its next-generation Nighthawk chip will begin delivery to customers by the end of the year. Nighthawk offers 120 qubits with 218 tunable couplers — 20 percent more than IBM’s Heron chip. The company claimed that the architecture will allow computations that require up to 5,000 two-qubit gates. It expects future iterations of Nighthawk to deliver up to 7,500 gates by the end of 2026 and up to 10,000 gates in 2027.

More details on Nighthawk are available in an announcement from IBM. 

IBM also said that it is able to run its recently announced quantum error correction code, Relay-BP, in real time on standard FPGAs from AMD. "Implementing it, and showing that the implementation is actually 10 times faster than what is needed, is a big deal," Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research, told Reuters. Gambetta also discussed the findings in a post on LinkedIn, and IBM released a technical report on arXiv.

Error-correction review

Tech Monitor, meanwhile, published a comprehensive review of error correction announcements from companies and institutions like Infleqtion, QuEra, Riverlane, Harvard, University of Chicago, and Yale.

“For all the excitement around faster, more reliable qubits, QEC remains a formidable engineering problem. Hardware has finally caught up enough to support real explorations of quantum error correction. But implementing these codes isn’t straightforward. They depend heavily on the architecture. Neutral atoms make it easier, ions a bit less so, and superconducting systems are much harder to wire for the interconnectedness these codes need,” former NIST Deputy Director Carl Williams said in the piece.

Phonon phase control

A team from the University of Chicago demonstrated the ability to deterministically control a phonon’s phase for the first time. The team scattered these tiny mechanical vibrations off a superconducting qubit and mediated the electrical interaction, allowing the possibility of sending phonon-based data without the randomness of photon-based platforms.

“The deterministic nature of our phonon platform implies this may prove a better platform for quantum computing than photons, although there are still many open questions,” Andrew Cleland, whose lab collaborated with Liang Jiang’s team on the project, said in an announcement. 

This work was published in Nature Physics. The Cleland lab recently earned a $5 million DARPA grant to support a qubit-based neutrino detector.

Electric signals in magnons

University of Delaware engineers found that magnons should be able to generate measurable electric signals. Their models show that when the quasiparticles move through antiferromagnetic materials, they can create electric polarization and produce detectable voltage.

This work was published in PNAS.

Quickbits

• On-Chip Verified Quantum Computation with an Ion-Trap Quantum Processing Unit (PRL)

• Parallelized telecom quantum networking with an ytterbium-171 atom array (Nature Physics)

• National Quantum Algorithm Center to award two postdocs for quantum application development in Illinois; applications due December 10

Quantum Campus is edited by Bill Bell, a science writer and marketing consultant who has covered physics and high-performance computing for more than 25 years. Disclosure statement.