[HN Gopher] An 11-qubit atom processor in silicon with all fidel...
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An 11-qubit atom processor in silicon with all fidelities from
99.10% to 99.99%
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 71 points
Date : 2025-12-21 12:07 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Source and "readable" article:
| https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/12/17/sqc-study-shows-sil...
| refulgentis wrote:
| This is a PR release meant to accompany the scientific work
| shown in the actual source / link. I don't mean to be
| argumentative, just, would have taken back the time I spent
| reading it after reading the Nature version. It's just "go read
| Nature" + 3 bullet points + anodyne CXO quotes.
| dvh wrote:
| Can it run Shor's?
| Ellipsis753 wrote:
| It should be able to factor 15.
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| So can a 10 year old. The breakthrough I'm waiting for is
| factoring something I cant do in my head.
| thrance wrote:
| And so can a dog: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf
| aipatselarom wrote:
| How much money or time do they owe you, though?
| iwontberude wrote:
| But it can't because the error rate is still too high even
| for the most trivial examples
| vtomole wrote:
| No, and Shor's is not a good benchmark for these early quantum
| computers: https://algassert.com/post/2500
| sestep wrote:
| That's a 404; here's a working link:
| https://algassert.com/post/2500
| vtomole wrote:
| Oops, updated. Thanks!
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I'm not sure you can really call it "early days" anymore. The
| first quantum computer was in 1998. That's 27 years ago.
| vtomole wrote:
| "early days" means that the 1998 computer didn't have
| qubits that were below the error correction threshold. Now
| we have hundreds of qubits below threshold. We'll need
| millions of qubits like these for quantum computing to be
| useful. If that take decades, this is the "early days"
| relatively.
|
| It's not only early days in hardware, it's early days in
| practical applications as well:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09124
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I admit it's early days in practical application. But in
| hardware definitely not.
| vtomole wrote:
| Depends on what we mean by "early days on hardware".
|
| If we mean "we've have been working on this for almost 3
| decades. That's a very long time to be working on
| something!". I agree.
|
| If we mean "We just now only have a few logical qubits
| that outperform their physical counterparts and we'll
| need thousands of these logical qubits to run anything
| useful" then we are still in the early days.
| sgt101 wrote:
| can you give a bit more information on 100's of qubits
| below threshold? I wasn't aware of 100's...
| vtomole wrote:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09848-5
| performs CZ gates on up to 256 qubits with fidelities of
| 99.5%, which is good enough to run surface codes below
| threshold.
| trebligdivad wrote:
| The engineering at those scales is pretty magical isn't it!
| Getting a whole bunch of individual atoms exactly where they want
| them. I wonder what the success rate is - i.e. how many do they
| build to get one working.
| krastanov wrote:
| Usually they randomly shoot atoms at the substrate and then
| just search for a spot (among thousands) where it randomly has
| the configuration they want. Still pretty amazing.
| trebligdivad wrote:
| Can they do that here, they've got quite a few sets of 4/5
| atoms which they've interconnected, so that's a lot to get by
| shotgunning it. I'd assumed they were using something like a
| STM to nudge the atoms around.
| wrs wrote:
| The "precision manufacturing" reference in the paper is to
| this 2012 paper about an STM placement technique. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nnano.2012.21
| nikanj wrote:
| This being a research paper, the rate is 1.0. They built one,
| then tinkered until it worked, then published.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Quantum Computing is a scam.
|
| I have not seen any progress or breakthroughs in the QC field at
| all that are significant.
|
| If the only goal for QC is to try to run Shor's algorithm or to
| "try to break the bitcoin blockchain" then it is worse than
| useless.
| vtomole wrote:
| QC progress happens super-exponentially:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383233
| colesantiago wrote:
| Graphs aren't telling me anything.
|
| What are the real world use cases _now, today_? The only
| thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and funding paying
| for the employment of scientific experimentation, which isn
| 't a real world application.
|
| Do I have to wait 15 to 30 years for a series of real world
| changing breakthroughs that I can already do on a NVIDIA GPU
| card?
|
| That doesn't exponential at all, in fact that sounds very
| very bearish.
| vtomole wrote:
| The graphs aren't telling you that QC hardware is not
| improving at a super-exponential pace?
|
| There are no real world use cases today. The hardware is
| not advanced enough yet, but it's improving exponentially.
| iinnPP wrote:
| I think the point being made is that the graphs don't
| show real world applications progress. Being 99.9999999%
| or 0.000001% of the way to a useful application could be
| argued as no progress given the stated metric. Is there a
| guarantee that these things can and will work given
| enough time?
| vtomole wrote:
| > Is there a guarantee that these things can and will
| work given enough time?
|
| Quantum theory predicts that they will work given enough
| time. If they don't work, there is something about
| physics that we are missing.
| pohl wrote:
| Sounds like a pursuit where we win either way
| ziofill wrote:
| Unless the overall cost is too high, but yes it's
| definitely worth pursuing as far as we currently know.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| Publishing findings that amount to an admission that you
| and others spent a fortune studying a dead end is career
| suicide and guarantees your excommunication from the
| realm of study and polite society. If a popular theory is
| wrong, some unlucky martyr must first introduce
| incontrovertible proof and then humanity must wait for
| the entire generation of practitioners whose careers are
| built on it to die.
| vtomole wrote:
| Quantum theory is so unlikely to be wrong that if large-
| scale fault tolerant quantum computers could not be
| built, the effort to try to build them will not be a dead
| end, but instead a revolution in physics.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Quantum theory says that quantum computers are
| mathematically plausible. It doesn't say anything about
| whether it's possible to construct a quantum computer in
| the real world of a given configuration. It's entirely
| possible that there's a physical limit that makes useful
| quantum computers impossible to construct.
| vtomole wrote:
| Quantum theory says that quantum computers are physically
| plausible. Quantum theory lies in the realm of physics,
| not mathematics. As a physical theory, it makes
| predictions about what is plausible in the real world.
| One of those predictions is that it's possible to build a
| large-scale fault tolerant quantum computer.
|
| The way to test out this theory is to try out an
| experiment to see if this is so. If this experiment
| fails, we'll have to figure out why theory predicted it
| but the experiment didn't deliver.
| kevlened wrote:
| > The only thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and
| funding paying for the employment of scientific
| experimentation
|
| Then invest accordingly, and later reinvest your winnings
| in a different direction.
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| It's not, but I can understand how it might look that way to a
| tech industry professional used to dealing with scams (indeed,
| there are lots of scam-adjacent startups with quantum-flavored
| branding). Real science and engineering are just very difficult
| and take a long time. You can go to the arXiv, read the papers,
| and see the progress and breakthroughs that are made every
| year. But scientists are relatively honest, so even their
| breakthroughs are incremental.
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| Maybe I should clarify that this isn't meant in a combative
| way, although it is in defense of scientists, who shouldn't
| be liable for other people's marketing.
|
| Here's what's going on here: there's a way that people talk
| past each other, because they mean different things by the
| same words, because they ultimately have different cultures
| and values.
|
| There's one kind of person (let's call them "technologists,"
| but I'm sure there's a better word) who feels deeply and
| intuitively that the point of a technology is to Create
| Shareholder Value. There's another kind (let's call them
| "scientists") who feels deeply and intuitively that the point
| of a technology is to Evince That We Have Known The Mind Of
| God. I think that these two kinds of people have a hard time
| understanding one another. Sometimes they don't realize, as
| strange as it sounds, that the other exists.
|
| There are many scientists who have been working on problems
| falling loosely under the umbrella of "quantum computing" for
| a few decades now. Most of them are not literally Building A
| Quantum Computer, or even trying to. Not exactly. For this
| reason it might be better to call the field "things you can
| do with coherent control of isolated quantum systems" than
| "quantum computing." There are many strange and wonderful
| things that you can see when you have good coherent control
| of isolated quantum systems. The scientists are largely
| interested in seeing those things, in order to Evince That We
| Have Known The Mind Of God. One sort of strange and wonderful
| thing, way down the line, is maybe factoring big numbers? The
| scientists honestly call that a "goal," because it would be
| strange and wonderful indeed. But it's not really _the_ goal.
| The scientists don 't really care about it for its own sake,
| and certainly not for the sake of Creating Shareholder Value.
| It's just one thing that would Evince That We Have Known The
| Mind Of God.
|
| Incidentally, over those last couple of decades, we've gotten
| _way_ better at coherent control of isolated quantum systems,
| and have, in many ways, succeeded at Evincing That We Have
| Known The Mind Of God again and again. We have made, and
| continue to make, amazing progress. One day we probably will
| factor large numbers. But that 's not really the goal for the
| scientists.
|
| On the other hand, there are "technologists" who hear about
| the goal of factoring large numbers, take this to be, in some
| sense, "the point" (that is, a proxy for Creating Shareholder
| Value), and expect it to happen in short order. They raise
| lots of money and promise a payout. They might act in very
| "commercial" ways, telling people what things are going to
| happen when, using an idiosyncratic, personal definition of
| truth. This is understood and expected in commercial
| situations. They and their creditors may be disappointed.
|
| The trouble is that it's hard for people on the outside to
| tell the difference between the scientists and the
| technologists! This makes things confusing. On some level,
| this is a failure of science communication: laypeople hear
| about breakthroughs (from scientists), then don't see the
| promises of technologists immediately fulfilled, they get
| confused, and they start to think the scientists are lying.
| But they're not! They're different people.
|
| Another thing that laypeople don't really know is that there
| _are_ commercially-useful and near-commercially-useful
| technologies using coherent control of isolated quantum
| systems. They 've come out of the same research program, but
| aren't strictly "quantum computing." I don't know why it's
| not more widely known that quantum sensors made out of qubits
| (usually a different kind of qubit than the kind used for
| computing applications!) are on the market today, and beat
| other sensors along a variety of axes.
|
| This might sound like goalpost-moving, but I promise you it's
| not. If it sounds like goalpost-moving, it's because there
| are two different relevant groups of people you hadn't
| previously resolved!
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| Here's an analogous situation that might clarify the
| dynamic somewhat:
|
| 1. Sam Altman: [tells a tall tale to raise 100 quintillion
| dollars]
|
| 2. Outside observer: "hey, these so-called AI researchers
| have been pulling the wool over our eyes! They've promised
| AGI for decades. Where's my robot maid?"
|
| 3. Researcher who's been making steady progress in a niche
| subfield of optimization algorithms at Nebraska State
| University for the last 20 years: "huh?"
| vtomole wrote:
| Silicon is not one of the leading modalities for quantum
| computers, but it has progressed a lot in the past ~2-3 years.
| Here are a few key advancements that have happened as of late:
|
| - Intel can now do 2D which means a Surface code can be run on
| these devices: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14918
|
| - HRL can now do 2D as well: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08861
|
| - They are solving the wiring problem:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-023-01491-3
|
| - Their interconnects are high fidelity:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09827-w
| iwontberude wrote:
| Ahh yes another quantum processor that creates noise.
| vtomole wrote:
| This processor is state-of-the-art for silicon quantum
| computing. It's where modalities like superconducting were 15
| years ago, and superconducting does not create noise these days
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y
| iwontberude wrote:
| Gate fidelity significantly less than 100 is always noisy,
| regardless of the qubit itself
| vtomole wrote:
| Sure, I'm not disagreeing that this processor is noisy,
| just providing enough context to say that it's fine.
| Historically, these devices improve enough to be under
| threshold at which point it doesn't matter that they are
| noisy cause error correction protocols can be run on top of
| them.
| nikanj wrote:
| Quantum computers can almost, but not quite, factor numbers
| bigger than 10.
|
| Time for git to break all workflows by showing huge alerts if a
| server is using crypto not proven quantum-proof!
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