By Robert Davis, Technical Writer, IBM Quantum and Qiskit. Researchers believe quantum computers will soon be able to solve certain problems more efficiently than classical computers. To measure and classify those efficiency gains, we rely on computational complexity theory, a branch of computer science that centers on measuring and comparing…

By Nicholas LaRacuente, Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago & the Chicago Quantum Exchange. Noise is among the most important hurdles in the way of full-scale quantum computing. Therefore, it’s crucial that we understand it as best we can so that we can counteract it. But deep study of…

By Nicola Mariella¹, Anton Dekusar¹, Steve Flinter², Mehrdad Maleki², Prina Patel³, Ryan Mandelbaum⁴ Some computational tasks seem easy on the surface. For example, if I give you a jumble of dots connected by a random assortment of lines, and then give you a shape and ask you to find it…

By Robert Davis and Daniel J. Egger Quantum logic gates are one of the fundamental building blocks of quantum circuits; they give us the ability to manipulate qubits and execute quantum computations. In superconducting quantum computing, we implement quantum gates by zapping our qubits with carefully designed pulses of microwave…

The year is 2015. Having had enough of cats, a group of quantum physicists deliberate over which creature they will subject to their mind-bending thought experiments next. “Lions? Too fearsome. Dolphins? Too intelligent. Tardigrades? Too obscure. Quantum pigeons? …Perfect.” …

By Zoran Krunic (Amgen), Frederik F. Flöther (IBM Quantum), Omar Shehab (IBM Quantum) How do I know if I should try a quantum computer for a given problem — and can I answer this question quickly and easily? The recent progress in quantum computing applications in different industries has brought…

By Wiktor Mazin, Principal Data Scientist and IBM Quantum Ambassador New students to quantum computing will tell you that it’s hard to visualize the complex mathematics of qubits. Typically, we rely on the Bloch sphere and Q-sphere. …

When the first cloud-based quantum processors went live in 2016, they changed the quantum computing field forever. For the first time, anyone with an IBM Quantum Experience login had access to this hardware, and could use it to explore quantum information science, test quantum algorithms, and even begin running simple…

By Laurin Fischer, Rohit Prasad Bhatt, Fred Jendrzejewski, Daniel J. Egger Cold Atoms: Quantum circuits and algorithms for quantum simulators? Universal quantum computers may one day speed-up a variety of challenging problems. However, this universality comes at the price of an algorithmic overhead, such as the need for swap gates and trotterization. If we give up the constraint of…