Zuchongzhi (quantum computer)

2025: Announcement of Zuchongzhi-3 quantum computer that beat Google's development by a million times

In early March 2025, researchers at China University of Science and Technology (USTC) reported on the development of an advanced superconducting quantum computer Zuchongzhi-3 that is said to be laying the groundwork for a whole new era of computing. According to the developers, the Zuchongzhi-3 is one million times faster than the quantum processor Google Sycamore.

Zuchongzhi-3 has 105 qubits against 54 for Google Sycamore. According to Chinese researchers, in solving certain problems, the new quantum system in performance is 15 orders of magnitude ahead of the most powerful modern supercomputers with traditional architecture. Zuchongzhi-3 was tested on random quantum circuit sampling problems. The device demonstrates a coherence time of 72 μs, the accuracy of single-bit operations is about 99.9%, two-bit operations - 99.62%. The accuracy of parallel reading reaches 99.13%.

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Фото: phys.org

To assess the capabilities of the system, experts sampled random quantum circuits with 83 qubits and 32 layers. The new quantum computer was able to cope with the task quadrillion times faster than the time it would take the most powerful classical supercomputer.

The creators of Zuchongzhi-3 continue active research in the fields of quantum error correction, quantum entanglement, quantum modeling and quantum chemistry. The achievement shown marks an important milestone in improving the performance of quantum computing. Zuchongzhi-3 has demonstrated quantum superiority - the ability of a quantum computer to solve problems that are, in principle, impossible for classical computers or require extremely much time to perform calculations.^[1]

2021: Demonstration of the world's most powerful quantum computer

In mid-July 2021, Chinese researchers demonstrated the most powerful in the world, quantum computer squeezing processor Sycamore away from Google leadership positions.

A team of researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China has developed a two-dimensional programmable superconducting quantum processor called Zuchongzhi capable of combining up to 66 qubits, but the researchers used just 56 qubits to demonstrate its capabilities. The computer solved the reference problem of modeling random quantum circuits, which involves long sequences of operations on qubits and measuring results. The more qubits in the system, the more difficult the solution of the problem. It is extremely difficult to get the same results on a classic supercomputer due to the need to calculate a huge number of possible states in which the system can be.

China has created the world's most powerful quantum computer Zuchongzhi

Zuchongzhi coped with the task in an hour, which would take a classic computer more than eight years. This task is about 100 times more complex than the one solved by Google's Sycamore quantum processor in 2019, formerly called the most powerful in the world. The Sycamore quantum system used 54 qubits and the Zuchongzhi system 56, while demonstrating a result proving that as the number of quantum bits increases, the performance of the quantum system increases exponentially. Thus, the new Chinese development is the most powerful programmable quantum computer in the world, and has the potential to increase performance when activating all available 66 qubits.

Peter Knight from British Imperial College in London noted that the Zuchongzhi system proved experimentally theoretical calculations:

Now we reliably know that we can surpass the performance of classic machines by adding a few more qubits.[2]

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