IonQ Says It Has Achieved Expected Quantum Volume Greater than Four Million

(Fortune) IonQ says it has built the world’s most powerful quantum computer, as measured by a common industry metric. On a machine featuring 32 qubits—the quantum equivalent of classical computing’s bits—IonQ says it has achieved “an expected” quantum volume greater than 4 million. The figure vaults ahead of the previous record: a quantum volume of 128 announced just one day prior by Honeywell.
Peter Chapman, IonQ’s chief executive, said that as the company releases newer iterations of its machines in the years ahead, updated measures will be required. “The number will become so large, we’ll have to leave quantum volume behind,” he said.
IonQ is tilting against tech giants many times the company’s size, such as IBM, Google, Honeywell, Intel, and Microsoft. The five-year-old startup based in College Park, Md., is racing, like the others, to give businesses a computing edge in domains such as chemistry, financial modeling, medicine, and artificial intelligence.
In a preprint article posted on Sept. 24 to ArXiv, an online science database, a team of scientists including Monroe recently claimed to have achieved “error correction with gain” on a 13-qubit mahcine. The experiment, if verified, marks a quantum computing milestone—a drastic reduction in error for notoriously finicky qubits.