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Quantum breakthrough that eliminates long pauses between calculations
The development of quantum computing promises to solve extremely complex mathematical and scientific challenges in just a few seconds, while today's most powerful supercomputers would take years to perform the same tasks. This technology opens the door to faster research in the areas of climate change, the development of new drugs and synthetic materials, and advanced solutions for clean energy. IBM plans to build systems with more than 2,000 qubits and a billion circuits in this area by 2033 as part of its IBM Quantum Platform. An important intermediate goal is to eliminate errors on systems with 200 qubits and 100 million "gates", where the IBM Nighthawk r2 processor with its "7,500 gates" sets a completely new milestone.
In the operation of quantum systems to date, the main noticeable delay was the conditional reset, in which qubits had to rest in the ground state before a new round of computational operations. This pause typically lasted several hundred microseconds and created a significant bottleneck. IBM solved this problem in the IBM Nighthawk r2 processor by incorporating a dissipative reset device, which uses a high-dynamic-range coupler to instantly return the programmable qubit to the ground state when needed. This reduced the qubit energy conservation time from 200 microseconds to about 25 nanoseconds.
Because each qubit has its own connection to the coupler, resetting occurs completely independently, without affecting neighboring elements. The total idle time between each cycle has been reduced to just one microsecond, allowing speeds of up to 100,000 cycles per second. This is 25 times faster than the previous IBM Heron model.
Faster resets also reduce initial errors by a factor of 25, and the IBM Nighthawk r2 processor uses a mesh structure in which most qubits are connected to their four nearest neighbors. The true stability and reliability of these exceptional speeds will only be seen in longer-term tests by external researchers on the IBM Quantum Platform.
