An 11-qubit atom processor in silicon with all fidelities from 99.10% to 99.99%

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09827-w

86 58 7 months ago

Source and “readable” article: https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/12/17/sqc-study-shows-sil...

This is a PR release meant to accompany the scientific work shown in the actual source / link. I don’t mean to be argumentative, just, would have taken back the time I spent reading it after reading the Nature version. It’s just “go read Nature” + 3 bullet points + anodyne CXO quotes.

dvh• 7 months ago

Can it run Shor's?

Ellipsis753• 7 months ago

It should be able to factor 15.

YesThatTom2• 7 months ago

So can a 10 year old. The breakthrough I’m waiting for is factoring something I cant do in my head.

iwontberude3• 7 months ago

But it can’t because the error rate is still too high even for the most trivial examples

vtomole16• 7 months ago

No, and Shor's is not a good benchmark for these early quantum computers: https://algassert.com/post/2500

sestep• 7 months ago

That's a 404; here's a working link: https://algassert.com/post/2500

rowanG0772• 7 months ago

I'm not sure you can really call it "early days" anymore. The first quantum computer was in 1998. That's 27 years ago.

avadodin• 7 months ago

Maybe the real quantum computing was the friends we made along the way

trebligdivad2• 7 months ago

The engineering at those scales is pretty magical isn't it! Getting a whole bunch of individual atoms exactly where they want them. I wonder what the success rate is - i.e. how many do they build to get one working.

krastanov• 7 months ago

Usually they randomly shoot atoms at the substrate and then just search for a spot (among thousands) where it randomly has the configuration they want. Still pretty amazing.

trebligdivad2• 7 months ago

Can they do that here, they've got quite a few sets of 4/5 atoms which they've interconnected, so that's a lot to get by shotgunning it. I'd assumed they were using something like a STM to nudge the atoms around.

8note2• 7 months ago

hmm. i remember my electron microscopes prof being very excited about his ability to manipulate single atoms exactly where he wants them ~10years ago.

id have assumed the holography has gotten more common and able to operate on bigger volumes

nikanj2• 7 months ago

This being a research paper, the rate is 1.0. They built one, then tinkered until it worked, then published.

colesantiago2• 7 months ago

Quantum Computing is a scam.

I have not seen any progress or breakthroughs in the QC field at all that are significant.

If the only goal for QC is to try to run Shor's algorithm or to "try to break the bitcoin blockchain" then it is worse than useless.

vtomole16• 7 months ago

QC progress happens super-exponentially: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383233

colesantiago2• 7 months ago

Graphs aren't telling me anything.

What are the real world use cases now, today? The only thing I see in the QC space, are QC stocks and funding paying for the employment of scientific experimentation, which isn't a real world application.

Do I have to wait 15 to 30 years for a series of real world changing breakthroughs that I can already do on a NVIDIA GPU card?

That doesn't exponential at all, in fact that sounds very very bearish.

throwaway_72744• 7 months ago

It’s not, but I can understand how it might look that way to a tech industry professional used to dealing with scams (indeed, there are lots of scam-adjacent startups with quantum-flavored branding). Real science and engineering are just very difficult and take a long time. You can go to the arXiv, read the papers, and see the progress and breakthroughs that are made every year. But scientists are relatively honest, so even their breakthroughs are incremental.

throwaway_72744• 7 months ago

Maybe I should clarify that this isn't meant in a combative way, although it is in defense of scientists, who shouldn't be liable for other people's marketing.

Here's what's going on here: there's a way that people talk past each other, because they mean different things by the same words, because they ultimately have different cultures and values.

There's one kind of person (let's call them "technologists," but I'm sure there's a better word) who feels deeply and intuitively that the point of a technology is to Create Shareholder Value. There's another kind (let's call them "scientists") who feels deeply and intuitively that the point of a technology is to Evince That We Have Known The Mind Of God. I think that these two kinds of people have a hard time understanding one another. Sometimes they don't realize, as strange as it sounds, that the other exists.

There are many scientists who have been working on problems falling loosely under the umbrella of "quantum computing" for a few decades now. Most of them are not literally Building A Quantum Computer, or even trying to. Not exactly. For this reason it might be better to call the field "things you can do with coherent control of isolated quantum systems" than "quantum computing." There are many strange and wonderful things that you can see when you have good coherent control of isolated quantum systems. The scientists are largely interested in seeing those things, in order to Evince That We Have Known The Mind Of God. One sort of strange and wonderful thing, way down the line, is maybe factoring big numbers? The scientists honestly call that a "goal," because it would be strange and wonderful indeed. But it's not really the goal. The scientists don't really care about it for its own sake, and certainly not for the sake of Creating Shareholder Value. It's just one thing that would Evince That We Have Known The Mind Of God.

Incidentally, over those last couple of decades, we've gotten way better at coherent control of isolated quantum systems, and have, in many ways, succeeded at Evincing That We Have Known The Mind Of God again and again. We have made, and continue to make, amazing progress. One day we probably will factor large numbers. But that's not really the goal for the scientists.

On the other hand, there are "technologists" who hear about the goal of factoring large numbers, take this to be, in some sense, "the point" (that is, a proxy for Creating Shareholder Value), and expect it to happen in short order. They raise lots of money and promise a payout. They might act in very "commercial" ways, telling people what things are going to happen when, using an idiosyncratic, personal definition of truth. This is understood and expected in commercial situations. They and their creditors may be disappointed.

The trouble is that it's hard for people on the outside to tell the difference between the scientists and the technologists! This makes things confusing. On some level, this is a failure of science communication: laypeople hear about breakthroughs (from scientists), then don't see the promises of technologists immediately fulfilled, they get confused, and they start to think the scientists are lying. But they're not! They're different people.

Another thing that laypeople don't really know is that there are commercially-useful and near-commercially-useful technologies using coherent control of isolated quantum systems. They've come out of the same research program, but aren't strictly "quantum computing." I don't know why it's not more widely known that quantum sensors made out of qubits (usually a different kind of qubit than the kind used for computing applications!) are on the market today, and beat other sensors along a variety of axes.

This might sound like goalpost-moving, but I promise you it's not. If it sounds like goalpost-moving, it's because there are two different relevant groups of people you hadn't previously resolved!

8note2• 7 months ago

this does not explain something like the manhattan project.

its not necessarily time that real science and engineering takes, but resources.

there's lots of fast progress happening in areas that get a lot of resources invested into them, and much slower on areas that dont have financial champions. moving fast doesn't necessitate that something is a scam

vtomole16• 7 months ago

Silicon is not one of the leading modalities for quantum computers, but it has progressed a lot in the past ~2-3 years. Here are a few key advancements that have happened as of late:

- Intel can now do 2D which means a Surface code can be run on these devices: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14918

- HRL can now do 2D as well: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08861

- They are solving the wiring problem: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-023-01491-3

- Their interconnects are high fidelity: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09827-w

iwontberude3• 7 months ago

Ahh yes another quantum processor that creates noise.

vtomole16• 7 months ago

This processor is state-of-the-art for silicon quantum computing. It's where modalities like superconducting were 15 years ago, and superconducting does not create noise these days https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y

iwontberude3• 7 months ago

Gate fidelity significantly less than 100 is always noisy, regardless of the qubit itself

nikanj2• 7 months ago

Quantum computers can almost, but not quite, factor numbers bigger than 10.

Time for git to break all workflows by showing huge alerts if a server is using crypto not proven quantum-proof!

notepad0x902• 7 months ago

What's closer to practical application these days, photonic/optical computing or quantum computing (silicon or not)?

twosdai• 7 months ago

Photonic computing has a lot of practical applications for signal transfer already.

Basically anytime we send a signal across a large fiber optic cable we need to convert signal from light back to electricity and that requires some level of photonic computing. Its used at scale today. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/science/photonics

However I suspect that you mean photonic computing where a computer on chip device uses photons instead of electrons to communicate. In which case, as far as I know is still research phase.

notepad0x902• 7 months ago

Thank you, I didn't know that. and you were right, I meant photons instead of electrons being used at the processor logic-gate level.

An 11-qubit atom processor in silicon with all fidelities from 99.10% to 99.99%

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