Borealis
Quantum computational advantage, with light
A programmable photonic quantum computer with 216 squeezed-state qubits that outperforms the best classical supercomputers at a specific task.
Why it matters
Beyond the reach of the fastest supercomputers
Using direct simulation, the fastest supercomputer in the world would take approximately 9,000 years to generate a single such sample, compared to 36 microseconds for Borealis. This runtime advantage is more than 50 million times larger than that of earlier photonic demonstrations.
216
Squeezed-state qubits
1,200+
Gate parameters, freely specified by the user
1+ km
Longest stabilized fiber buffer loop
6 μs
Of storage time in that loop
Inside Borealis
Under the hood: how Borealis works
Source
Squeezed-state qubits are generated from a nonlinear crystal inside an optical resonator called an “optical parametric oscillator” (OPO).
Loops
They are sent to a series of three loop-based interferometers, ultimately resulting in a three-dimensional entangled state.
Control
This entanglement is controlled by variable beamsplitters (VBS) and fiber optic delay lines.
Readout
Readout is performed using a demultiplexer (demux), followed by an array of photon-number resolving detectors (PNRs).
Fully programmable
Borealis is the first photonic quantum computer with quantum computational advantage to offer users full programmability over all its gates: over 1,200 parameters can be freely specified by the user encoding their program, as well as the brightness of the input squeezed-state qubits.
Counting photons
In Borealis, we employ highly sensitive energy sensors to count photons. These are called photon-number-resolving detectors, or PNRs for short. The PNR detectors are the only part of Borealis requiring cryogenic cooling.
A step toward fault tolerance
The most significant example of such a technology embedded within Borealis and needed for fault-tolerance is the use of stabilized fiber optic delay lines to store photonic squeezed-state qubits in buffer memory. The longest such buffer loop in Borealis is over 1 km, representing 6 microseconds of storage time.
Read more
Go deeper on Borealis
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BlogBeating classical computers with Borealis
June 1, 2022
The story behind the story of the world’s first public cloud-deployed computer with quantum computational advantage.
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Press releaseXanadu launches first public cloud-deployed computer with quantum computational advantage
June 1, 2022
Borealis is a programmable photonic quantum computer with 216 squeezed-state qubits that outperforms the best classical supercomputers at a specific task.
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Research paperQuantum computational advantage with a programmable photonic processor
Nature · June 2022
The results of this test were peer-reviewed, and are now published in the scientific journal Nature.
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Talk to our team about Xanadu's photonic hardware and our path to fault tolerance.