# Tag Info

31

Google, IBM and Rigetti use transmon qubits; these are basically fancy LC circuits where a Josephson junction and capacitor connect two superconducting islands. Because of this, they are also often referred to as superconducting qubits. The qubit states are the various charge levels that can exist on the circuit; since the lowest two levels are separated in ...

18

It's just a coincidence. I can speak from personal recollection on the Google side. Google originally intended to use a 72 qubit chip (Bristlecone) where qubits were essentially directly connected to each other. They then switched to an architecture where qubits were connected indirectly via a coupler. The coupler requires a control line, so this increased ...

15

Google's paper/results are kind of sideways to questions in computational complexity about the relation between $\mathrm{BPP}$ and $\mathrm{BQP}$ (and even further from questions about whether $\mathrm{P}\ne\mathrm{NP}$). It's more as if Google relies on the hypothesis that $\mathrm{BPP}\ne\mathrm{BQP}$ as evidence that their quantum computer performs a ...

8

TL/DR: The two-qubit gates are going by the moniker "Sycamore gates" in the paper, and it appears that they would ideally want to explore more of the $(\phi, \theta)$ phase-space but for their purposes (of quantum supremacy) their current Sycamore gate is sufficient. The pattern of gates $\mathrm{ABCDCDAB}$ was chosen to avoid "wedges" ...

7

They say in Section X.H of the supplement that the Summit supercomputer has a power capacity of 14 megawatts. They compare that to their own setup. Their power consumption is mainly their dilution fridge, which they say is about 10 kilowatts plus about another 10 for chilled water for its supporting equipment. Their own supporting PCs and other ...

7

What does "obtaining samples" mean in this context? The same thing it means in a more classical context. Consider the probability distribution of the possible outcomes of a (possibly biased) coin flip. Sampling from this probability distributions means to flip the coin once and record the result (head or tail). If you sample many times, you can retrieve ...

6

So any universal gate set can replicate any other, since both are universal, but different architectures generally have different physical gates. While Clifford+T is a universal gate set that is very nice to think about theoretically, it isn't generally close to the one used in the lab. In most experimental setups, the physical level universal gate set used ...

6

While Craig Gidney (from Google) is correct in his comment which says that $X$ and $Y$ do not create superpositions on states that are not in superposition, such as $|0\rangle$ and $|1\rangle$; even if we assume that the initial state must not be in superposition, it is still possible to create superpositions with the 2-qubit gates, even if the 1-qubit gates ...

6

IBM You can view the basis gates that supporting at the hardware level for IBM's hardware through your dashboard. All the devices with more than 1 qubit have the same set of basis gates $\{CX, ID, RZ, SX, X \}$. Below is a screenshot of a particular device named ibmq_bogota. Google From google's quantum computer datasheet and Cirq documentation here it ...

5

A Hadamard gate isn't usually a physical object that you pass qubits through. In the case of superconducting qubits, the Hadamard gate is performed by bouncing microwaves off of the qubits. It doesn't look like anything. So you're not going to find a picture of a superconducting Hadamard gate on a chip. The closest thing to that would be one of the blips in ...

4

That seems to restrict the output probability distributions of all quantum circuits to rather high entropy distributions. The output of a typical randomly chosen quantum circuit is rather high entropy. That doesn't mean you can't construct circuits that have low entropy outputs (you can), it just means that picking random gates is a bad strategy for ...

4

While a follow-up question asks for the motivation behind the two-qubit gates used in Sycamore, this question focuses on the random nature of the single qubit operations used in Sycamore, that is, the gates $\{\sqrt{X},\sqrt{Y},\sqrt{W}=(X+Y)/\sqrt{2}\}$ applied to each of the $53$ qubits between each of the two-qubit gates. Although I agree with @Marsl ...

4

Fundamentally, a device such as an IBM quantum computer interacts according to a Hamiltonian, which might have some time-varying parameters. For example, for a single qubit, it might look like: $$H=BZ+\Omega(t)X,$$ where $X$ and $Z$ are the standard Pauli matrices, and $B$ is a constant. The goal is "simply" to specify the function $\Omega(t)$ to ...

4

All quantum circuits can be simulated on a classical computer, but not all circuits take the same amount of time to simulate. If information about the circuit is known in advance, certain patterns may be exploited to significantly reduce time or memory consumption. The hardest type of circuit to simulate is one in which all qubits are entangled and there is ...

4

In relating quantum computing to classical computing there may be a small conceptual hurdle that needs to be overcome. Although a classical $\mathsf{NAND}$ gate may be implemented in hardware (say CMOS with a set of N- and P-type transistors), the idea of a quantum gate such as a $\mathsf{CNOT}$ or an $\mathsf{H}$ gate used in quantum computing most often ...

4

The model's accuracy is purely empirical observation. The error trend (Fig 4, or 41:50 in the video) demonstrates that the error of the system (cross entropy fidelity with respect to simulated results) is tracked closely by the "high school probability" model he mentions. The way this basic model would work is to assume 1- and 2-qubit gate errors are ...

3

In the framing of the question (which I believe to be asked in good faith), there seems to be at least two objections. Sampling from a set of strings is not clearly a function, and Sampling is a physical process, outside of computation. Initially, with regard to the first objection, I assert that sampling is a function, as a search problem. For example, ...

3

The Church-Turing thesis is not in and of itself a rigorous concept, but rather a judgment on rigorous concepts of computability. As such, it's negotiable. The language in Rosser's 1939 expository paper about provability and computability is biased towards deterministic algorithms. There is an important simplifying theorem here: If you only care about ...

3

After some further consideration I think it's quite clear that the only probability mass function evaluated in the computation of $\mathcal{F}_{\text{XEB}}$ is that of the classically computed ideal distribution, denoted $P(x_i)$ in the main paper. This leads me to the conclusion that the phrasing of the following excerpt from section IV.C of the ...

3

Paraphrasing some tweets on the matter earlier, the result is rather underwhelming because it plays on a discrepancy between what they mean by quantum supremacy (QS) and what people tend to think QS means. What I find most people think QS is supposed to mean, and what I assumed it meant until a month or so ago, was that there exists a computable problem (in ...

3

Generally speaking, to prove quantum supremacy, you don't need to sample several times from the same unitary/circuit/output probability distribution. If you extract even a single sample from the output probability distribution of a circuit which you know is extremely hard to simulate classically, then you already achieved something that you couldn't do (...

3

Although it doesn't explicitly say it in the paper from Google, the diagrams in the paper are missing a qubit along the top edge. Most likely this is the "bad" qubit that wasn't used.

3

When I visited the Google Hardware Lab, they were extremely secretive about everything. It is unlikely anyone will be able to answer this question except for the narrow range of Google Hardware Lab employees, and the ones I know are not very open about what Google is doing. What I can do is answer what a different superconducting-qubit hardware company (D-...

3

How is this repetition rate calculated? The repetition rate is how many samples can be collected per second. You compute it by collecting some large number of samples and checking how much time it took. [Does Weber rely] on the T1 decay for repeating shots or uses some other technique. Weber uses active resets between circuit runs. It's the same chip used ...

3

the benchmarking method used in this paper is called cross entropy benchmarking (XEB). An example circuit implementation for a 5 qubit XEB sequence is shown in fig. 3 of the paper. For further info, I recommend looking at the supplementary information (SI) of this paper, particularly fig. S15. Another source of info for 2 qubit XEB and the cross entropy ...

2

As an initial matter, I think the Supplementary Information (linked in some other answers on this sight) has a significant amount of discussion on $\mathcal{F}_{XEB}$. However, as I understand it (misunderstandings are my own): There is indeed a concentration of outputs from a random quantum circuit, away from a state wherein the square of the coefficients ...

2

This answer only addresses the part about the necessity of the randomness of the circuit because I am by no means familiar with the physical implementation of the qubits at Google and what kind of constraints these impose on the implementation of certain gates. Now, for the randomness: Consider the problem of sampling from the output distribution of a ...

2

In the Sycamore paper linked in the comments, in the description of FIG. 4, the authors state: ...For each $n$, each instance is sampled with $N_s$ between 0.5 M and 2.5 M... For $m=20$, obtaining 1M samples on the quantum processor takes 200 seconds, while an equal fidelity classical sampling would take 10,000 years on 1M cores, and verifying the fidelity ...

2

Both IBM and Google unveiled 53-qubit processors. At this time, only Google published performance metrics such as 1- and 2-qubit gate errors. Until IBM publishes similar metrics we simply cannot even tell whether Google's processor outperforms IBM's. What we can tell is that the connectivity of the two processors is different - Google's Sycamore processor ...

2

My guess is that this is an example of co-opetition, i.e. collaborative competition. Number of qubits is just a single characteristic of a quantum processor, but there are a lot more, like tolerance, topology, etc. Also this characteristic is the only one that most people understand. Thus it's not reasonable to put all the resources on the increasing just ...

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