Photograph by Erik Lucero, Research Scientist and Lead Production Quantum Hardware, Google Research and UCSB Alumn
Faculty
QA &
JOHN MARTINIS
“Sycamore” “Sycamore” “Sycamore” Breaks Breaks Breaks the Speed Speed the Speed the Limit Limit Limit
Artist’s rendition of the Sycamore processor mounted in the cryostat, Forest Stearns, Google AI Quantum Artist in Residence
UCSB physicist John Martinis leads the Goleta-based Google team that achieved quantum supremacy
L
ast fall, a paper in the journal Nature described how Google’s 53-qubit quantum computer, named “Sycamore,” had achieved “quantum supremacy” by solving a massive sorting problem in a couple of minutes that Google said would have taken ten thousand years to solve on the world’s most powerful supercomputer. IBM, which built that supercomputer, named “Summit,” balked at the claim, arguing that certain data-packaging strategies would have enabled its sprawling machine to solve the problem in a period closer to two and a half days than to ten thousand years. To longtime UCSB physics professor John Martinis, now chief scientist and head of the hardware group that is building Sycamore, which hangs suspended like an elegant,
16 SPRING 2020
With its number-crunching capacity enabled by 53 qubits, like the one shown (top), “Sycamore” (above) provided a powerful proof of the quantum-computing concept.
