One of many challenges posed to quantum computing is the very short period at which a qubit superposition state can remain stable.
In common parlance, this is the duration of the uncertainty about whether the cat is alive.
A year ago, the record was 34 milliseconds. There is a good summary of the Weizman Institute of Science – Company result in Quantum Insider.
For several years before that, the University of Chicago held the record they set in 2020 at 22 milliseconds, and getting a full millisecond in a production environment still counts as impressive. That thousand-fold improvement was proudly summarized in the UChicago News.
The new record is over 23 minutes!
That’s another forty-thousand-fold improvement.
Together, that’s a 40-million-fold improvement in less than a decade.
Granted, there is a lot left to do to turn the University of Science and Technology of China‘s accomplishments into a computer. It’s not at all clear that it might be done at all with ytterbium-173.
Still, a 40-million-fold improvement makes commercial-scale quantum computing suddenly (and scarily) sound close on the horizon.
