A new trick brings stability to quantum operations

Submitted title was "ETH Zurich demonstrates 17,000 qubit array with 99.91% fidelity". We've changed it now.

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

With the hype QC these days, I find it hard to separate hype from real progress.

In case others are confused: the old HN title has been changed, and the new HN title is directly from the paper (and definitely not overhyped).

Reading the ETHZ article as well as the paper, they both seem pretty accurate and descriptive. Really sad HN is not discussing the actual cool research that was done, but not surprised since physics is outside HN's core competencies.

ETHZ news page is always overhyped. There is good research coming from there but their marketing is never worth reading.

its still more than my nephew managed to achieve this morning

BREAKING: ETHZ REFRAINS FROM RELEASING THE DETAILS OF THEIR QUBIT EXPERIMENT IN FEAR OF BREAKING THE FABRIC OF REALITY. READ NOW!!

And "they" being OP, not ETHZ.

The HN title is not the article's title

Not sure what distinction you are trying to make.

The researchers used a 58000 atom system, turned 17000 of them into qubits, and applied their gate to all those qubits simultaneously.

Are you doubting this? On what grounds? It's stated pretty clearly in the paper.

They had something like 58000 atoms in their lattice and managed to form 17000 qubits from atom pairs.

Pretty impressive already yeah, I'm sure either their team or another research team will try to improve the qubit yield. Increasing the atom count could be harder though, I'm not an expert but at some point you run into limits from the size of your lab/cooler/trap.

And yeah 99.9% fidelity is not anything groundbreaking, but it's pretty surprising for a "first try" on a new gate implementation. In contrast superconducting systems have been worked on for years and years with ridiculous amounts of investment and also only get 3 nines of fidelity, and IonQ just recently demonstrated 4 nines fidelity, but only after working on their system for many years too.

This is not a 17000 qubit general computer. Read the paper.

> “We can now make lots of swap gates with neutral atoms”, says Tilman Esslinger, “but of course we still need a few other ingredients to build a working quantum computer.”

yes, while this may not be a 17k qubit computer and has ways to go to get there the insights from it will likely help us to get there faster

and it's not the only "this is moving faster then expected new"

a year or so(?) ago some investments happen which make only sense if there had been some unpublished break through in hardware (through you never can exclude foolish absurd high Risiko investments)

then more recently google researchers had some break through wrt. quantum algorithms, it's not generally assumed that 10k qubits (in the right setup) are enough to break 256 elliptic curve cryptography (or 2048bit RSA) _in minutes_!

and there also where other breakthroughs quantum computer wrt. hardware

the general consensus of people more knowledgeable in this field seems to be going in the direction that you must _finish fully migrate to post quantum cryptography by 2029_.

Note that this isn't a "100% guarantee there are cable quantum computers in 2030", but a "the chance of this happening is too high to not be prepared by then".

Overall:

- from a academic/paper background 2029 seems to be the deadline to finish migrating to post quantum cryptography

- claudflare agrees and has moved up it's internal deadline to 2029

- same for Google, Google also seem to have prioritized quantum secure authentication over harvest now/decrypt later protections, which implies they are seriously worried about their authentication breaking potentially as early as 2030

- IBM expect some "moonshot" attacks against high value targets already in 2029

___

Through overall what does that mean for most people?

- if you run some small low security service then probably for now nothing, but make sure you can move to pq if the tooling (webpki, TLS, etc.) does

- for webpki, TLS and co having well working and by default supported pq cryptography is paramount

- if you have some very sensitive material where it's a big problem if it leaks even years later, then you have a problem because you probably should have already migrated to post quantum cryptography 1-2 years ago ... Note that symmetric encryption is mostly unaffected. Sure there are a lot of people saying it's "slashed in half" (e.g. 128bit => 64bit) but luckily that isn't fully true. I personally still would go with 256bit where viable, often there is little reason not to. BUT a lot of the ways of sharing that symmetric key use encryption which should be assumed to be broken soon.

- for VPNs if they allow complementing the asym. crypto with a symmetric key do that now (e.g. wireguard pre-shared key) but that is for many use cases a hen/egg issue as how do you securely exchange the pre-shared key? So look out for changes in the tooling/ecosystem.

- for DevOps, look out for changes in the ecosystem especially webpki/TLS/certs and look out for tools which have a high chance to not mitigate in time

- for Devs post quantum cryptography often looks like it could "just slot in" but that often isn't fully the case due to very different key sizes and performance characteristics. Look out for it. Also making you system ready to migrate to pq-safety was a recommendation by NSA and pretty much any other national cyber security agency for years by now. Furthermore with the standardization of ML-KEM the recommendation shifted to using that where viable (potentially in a hybrid KEM). So if you now notice that you never bother to check/plane ahead you probably should give it some priority now as you may be found to have acted in neglect which could in unlucky cases turn into legal liabilities.

They did not make a 17000 qubit computer. The qubits were not controllable or general in any way. The paper is linked, look at it.

This title is misleading.

It is still orders of magnitude away from breaking RSA 2048 even under the most optimistic assumptions. And qubits double waaay slower than transistors so far.

There are so many steps in quantum computing but there is nothing of note to suggest that we can get anywhere near building a device that outperforms HPC's at this stage.