# 128 qubit chip mounted on I/O system

Putting all of these qubits into superposition states — the initial Hamiltonian in the adiabatic algorithm — gives $2^{128} \sim 3 \cdot 10^{38}$ simultaneously held states.  Not quite the number of atoms in the earth, but close.

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I'm the chief technology officer of D-Wave and 2010 NAGA Brazilian jiu-jitsu light heavyweight world champion.

## 16 thoughts on “128 qubit chip mounted on I/O system”

1. I always find it funny when people compare number of states of a system to things like the “number of atoms on Earth” or the “number of electrons in the Universe.” Comparing dimensions of state spaces to a number in a unary numerical scheme always seemed to me kind of…unfair.

2. Why? It’s not a dimension of a state space, it’s the number of simultaneously held distinguishable (by the readouts) states in the system. People compare these to large numbers (electrons in the universe, width of the universe in mm, age of the universe in seconds) because it gives a point of reference for what really large numbers represent in some metric that’s more easily understandable.

Note that I am a self-appointed High Priest of the Church of the Ontological Reality of Many Worlds Quantum Mechanics, or CHORMWOQUM (all praise be to DD), and therefore my point of view on this matter may be biased somewhat🙂

3. JP: if we can get the stupid fridge it’s mounted on working.

4. That’s some damn nice work on all that wiring. What’s the cooling power of the fridge – does it take a long time for that huge thermal mass to reach base?

I love the way the chip looks like it’s imprisoned in a miniature iron maiden. Well, maybe an aluminium maiden as iron wouldn’t be so good for flux qubits🙂

5. Hi Suz

Cooling power at base is about 1 microwatt per mK. Base temp with payload is about 13 mK. It currently takes about 2 days to cool the pulse tube fridges from room temperature to base with full payload.

6. “That’s a real cool
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bit machine you’ve got there.”

7. Humor thwarted again by lack of word wrap.

8. 21th century tech, held up by 20th century tech. can you cool below room temp while you work on the fridge problem or is it a sealed unit already?

9. Suz,

To be clearer: the dilution part has several hundred uW of cooling power at 100 mK.

Andrew

10. Robert: I’m saying that counting the number of configurations of a system and comparing it to a number of objects is odd. If you take an n digit number, there are 10^n possible configurations. So for n=50, say, there are just about as many configurations as there are atoms on the earth (approx~10^50). Now you could also write 10^50 out in unary. This means you are putting an “atom” for every one of the 10^50….so you get a long list of 10^50 “atom”s.

The real backstory here is whether you should think about a n qubits as 2^n “real universes” or not. I tend to find such an idea….crazy!

But mostly I’m just being a pain and doing this for the sake of some fun🙂 (readers of this blog need something to do while they wait for the fridges to cool down.)

11. Would be great to have an update on this. Is it a working temperature yet, is there any life in the chips?