Inside how IBM?s engineers are designing quantum computers

This involved a great deal of talk about “qubit count,” “quantum coherence,” “error mitigation,” “software orchestration” and other topics you’d need to be an electrical engineer with a background in computer science and a familiarity with quantum mechanics to fully follow.I am not any of those things, but I have watched the quantum computing space long enough to know that the work being done here by IBM researchers — along with their competitors at companies like Google and Microsoft, along with countless startups around the world — stands to drive the next great leap in computing. (Sorry, Newton.) “Quantum computers simulate problems that we find in nature and in chemistry,” said Jay Gambetta, IBM’s vice president of quantum computing.Quantum computers could simulate the properties of a theoretical battery to help design one that is far more efficient and powerful than today’s versions. But none of that will be possible unless researchers can do the hard engineering work of turning a quantum computer from what is still largely a scientific experiment into a reliable industry.Inside the Watson building, Jerry Chow — who directs IBM’s experimental quantum computer center — opened a 9-foot glass cube to show me something that looked like a chandelier made out of gold: IBM’s Quantum System One. Much of the chandelier is essentially a high-tech fridge, with coils that carry superfluids capable of cooling the hardware to 100th of a degree Celsius above absolute zero — colder, Chow told me, than outer space.Refrigeration is key to making IBM’s quantum computers work, and it also demonstrates why doing so is such an engineering challenge. (Each second contains 1 million microseconds.) The challenge IBM and other companies face is engineering quantum computers that are less error-prone while “scaling the systems beyond thousands or even tens of thousands of qubits to perhaps millions of them,” Chow said.