Electrical cables usually excite only audiophiles, but physicists are buzzing about IBM’s announcement today that it has connected two copies of its latest quantum computing chip using aluminum cables nearly 1 meter long. The connections are key to IBM’s ambition to scale up its machines from roughly 100 quantum bits, or qubits, to the thousands needed to make a quantum computer far superior to today’s supercomputers at solving certain problems.
“It’s a milestone,” says Andrew Cleland, a physicist at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the work. “They’ve shown for the first time I know that they can take two processors and link them with meter-length cables.” However, some researchers caution the interconnect issue is not yet completely solved.
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