Team from ETH Zurich make high quality quantum swap gate using a geometric phase

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10285-1

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22112

ethz.ch

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237 points

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joko42

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4 days ago

60 comments

fsh ・ 4 days ago

I find the editorialized title misleading. They trapped 17000 atom pairs in an optical lattice and demonstrated a high-fidelity quantum gate between the atoms of each pair in parallel. There is no interaction between the atoms of different pairs and no individual control. The experiment demonstrates a very robust gate scheme, but is a long way from a programmable computer.

  • dang ・ 4 days ago

    Submitted title was "ETH Zurich demonstrates 17,000 qubit array with 99.91% fidelity". We've changed it now.

    Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

  • baxtr ・ 4 days ago

    With the hype QC these days, I find it hard to separate hype from real progress.

    • trollbridge ・ 4 days ago

      Reminds me the state of nuclear fusion.

      • blitzar ・ 4 days ago
        ・ 18 more

        Just a decade away now.

        • femto ・ 4 days ago

          That's progress, if fusion is always only 10 years away now! The running joke used to be that it was always 30 years away.

        • adrianN ・ 4 days ago

          Fusion is a number of dollars away, not years. It gets almost no funding because it’sa science and engineering experiment that most likely will not lead to economically viable power plants in a market dominated by renewables.

        • api ・ 4 days ago
          ・ 6 more

          … and like fusion it will be a decade away, a decade away, a decade away, six months away, then we have it.

          The “decade away” phenomenon comes from the fact that it’s basically impossible to time estimate innovation.

          • gerdesj ・ 4 days ago
            ・ 4 more

            I went to school in Oxfordshire in the '80s. Some visiting profs from JET joked that fusion was 25 years away then.

            • cbg0 ・ 4 days ago
              ・ 3 more

              Back then things were centered around "can we even do this?" and now it's more of "how do we keep this running more than 5 minutes?".

              • gerdesj ・ 3 days ago
                ・ 2 more

                My impression back then from those profs was that it (fusion) would be inevitable but you do have to think long term, really long term. I'm old enough now (55) to understand that mentality.

                I'd put money on something useful fusion related happening within the next 10 years or perhaps 20. I'm not up on the current state of experiments etc but it will happen.

                AGI? - lol!

                • api ・ 3 days ago

                  AFAIK superconductors are a major limiting tech. But we are slowly getting better ones, both by discovering more and by learning to mass produce superconducting wire.

                  With superconductors you can make magnetic bottles.

                  There’s also some interesting inertial confinement work happening. There the limiter is both confinement and the efficiency of the driver. Look up MagLIF for a hybrid magnetic inertial approach under study.

          • meltyness ・ 4 days ago

            ... and room temperature superconductors! If only we could sort out the feasibility, interdependencies, and priorities, but we just don't know, or well, I just don't know haha.

        • michaelcampbell ・ 4 days ago

          That's String Theory providing "answers", no?

        • mrroper ・ 4 days ago

          So just like AI?

        • pseudohadamard ・ 3 days ago

          They should ask Iran to do it, they're only a month away all the time.

        • ashirviskas ・ 4 days ago
          ・ 6 more

          Nah, it's a decade away from *now*.

          • blitzar ・ 4 days ago

            nahhh, definately from *now* though - 100% this time

          • dwd ・ 4 days ago
            ・ 4 more

            Now now or Just now?

            * I've worked with too many Sth Africans.

            • HenryMulligan ・ 4 days ago
              ・ 3 more

              For those of us who aren't familiar, what is the difference?

              • dwd ・ 10 hours ago

                The difference is how soon it might occur, except "now" can also mean they never get around to it.

                "Right now" is probably the only one that literally means now as the rest of the English-speaking world would assume.

    • functional_dev ・ 4 days ago

      The ETH article title is actually fine - "a new trick brings stability."

      The hype is in the HN title.

    • scorpionfeet ・ 4 days ago

      That’s why we have “reading”. Literally the first paragraph. So in this case, pretty easy to separate.

  • wasabi991011 ・ 4 days ago

    In case others are confused: the old HN title has been changed, and the new HN title is directly from the paper (and definitely not overhyped).

    Reading the ETHZ article as well as the paper, they both seem pretty accurate and descriptive. Really sad HN is not discussing the actual cool research that was done, but not surprised since physics is outside HN's core competencies.

  • progbits ・ 4 days ago

    ETHZ news page is always overhyped. There is good research coming from there but their marketing is never worth reading.

    • vasco ・ 4 days ago

      What is overhyped about: "A new trick brings stability to quantum operations". Are people complaining about the HN title as if it's the article's title?

  • ionwake ・ 4 days ago

    its still more than my nephew managed to achieve this morning

    • TheEaterOfSouls ・ 4 days ago

      I have questions. Is he attempting to build a quantum gate array? Seems kind of unfair to compare one person's efforts with a well-established university, if so. :P

freetonik ・ 4 days ago

Every single discussion thread about any announcement in quantum feels exactly the same:

1. this is not what you think it is, there are caveats and the title is misleading.

2. I feel there is so much hype around quantum computing.

3. It's like nuclear fusion, always 10 years away.

4. Nuclear fusion is at least practical. QC is not.

5. Did they manage to find prime factorization of 17 already? LOL

6. Cryptography will be dead, RIP bitcoin and https.

7. No, actually quantum computers are useless.

It's tiring.

I recommend this recent post by Scott Aaronson https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9668

nottorp ・ 4 days ago

Judging by the other comments on here, they learned to title their articles from OpenAI and Anthropic.

  • aswegs8 ・ 4 days ago

    BREAKING: ETHZ REFRAINS FROM RELEASING THE DETAILS OF THEIR QUBIT EXPERIMENT IN FEAR OF BREAKING THE FABRIC OF REALITY. READ NOW!!

  • Keyframe ・ 4 days ago

    And "they" being OP, not ETHZ.

  • hmry ・ 4 days ago

    The HN title is not the article's title

ktallett ・ 4 days ago

I am of the view the 17000 is simply referring to once they had the system set in the final stage they are happy with. They ran 17000 qubits through it over the course of testing and it led to a fidelity of 99%. Which is useful as fidelity is important, although this still isn't accurate enough, but it is no where near programmable general quantum computer.

  • wasabi991011 ・ 4 days ago

    They had something like 58000 atoms in their lattice and managed to form 17000 qubits from atom pairs.

    Pretty impressive already yeah, I'm sure either their team or another research team will try to improve the qubit yield. Increasing the atom count could be harder though, I'm not an expert but at some point you run into limits from the size of your lab/cooler/trap.

    And yeah 99.9% fidelity is not anything groundbreaking, but it's pretty surprising for a "first try" on a new gate implementation. In contrast superconducting systems have been worked on for years and years with ridiculous amounts of investment and also only get 3 nines of fidelity, and IonQ just recently demonstrated 4 nines fidelity, but only after working on their system for many years too.

    • ktallett ・ 4 days ago

      It will be very challenging to implement their system off this paper as there are many key experimental details missing. I won't get into my hatred of this but open methodology is sorely needed in QC and it really hampers speed of development across the whole sector. As you say you will run into limitations eventually but again hard to judge where those limitations are.

ForgotMyUUID ・ 4 days ago

“Demonstrates“ vs. “can be applied to 17,000 qubits simultaneously.“ - too completely different things, you know ...

  • wasabi991011 ・ 4 days ago

    Not sure what distinction you are trying to make.

    The researchers used a 58000 atom system, turned 17000 of them into qubits, and applied their gate to all those qubits simultaneously.

    Are you doubting this? On what grounds? It's stated pretty clearly in the paper.

snthpy ・ 4 days ago

For real? I wouldn't have thought so many would be possible so soon. Might actually need to look into quantum computing again after 20 years.

  • SideQuark ・ 4 days ago

    They did not make a 17000 qubit computer. The qubits were not controllable or general in any way. The paper is linked, look at it.

    This title is misleading.

    • snthpy ・ a day ago

      Thanks for the clarification.

  • sigmoid10 ・ 4 days ago

    It is still orders of magnitude away from breaking RSA 2048 even under the most optimistic assumptions. And qubits double waaay slower than transistors so far.

    • snthpy ・ a day ago

      Thanks. What order of magnitude qbits would be needed for RSA 2048?

    • foobar10000 ・ 4 days ago

      AES128 / Grover?

      • sigmoid10 ・ 3 days ago

        Still requires thousands of logical qubits, which would correspond to millions of physical qubits. And this machine isn't even fully there for the physical qubit part. It's like the first step to physical qubits.

dathinab ・ 4 days ago

things are speeding up dangerously

sure this isn't a 17k qubit quantum computer, but it's a step in that direction

and this isn't the only news falling under "this is moving faster then expected"

just one in many which scream "time to take it serious, deadline 2029 try earlier"

---

a year or so(?) ago some investments happened, which made only sense if there had been some unpublished break through in quantum computer hardware (through you never can exclude foolish absurd high Risiko investments). (Sadly I didn't bookmark/safe the relevant articles/analysis, so take with a grain of salt.)

then more recently, google researchers had some break through wrt. quantum algorithms. It can now be generally assumed that 10k qubits (in the right setup) are enough to break 256 elliptic curve cryptography (or 2048bit RSA) _in minutes_!

There where also other hardware breakthrough published, and error correction break throughs etc.

The general consensus of people more knowledgeable in this field then me seems to be going in the direction that you must _finish fully migrate to post quantum cryptography by 2029_.

Note that this isn't a "100% guarantee there are cable quantum computers in 2030", but a "the chance of this happening is too high to not be prepared by then".

Also that is mainly true for webpki, TLS, cloud infrastructure/deployment systems, code signing, etc.

Overall:

- from a academic/paper background 2029 seems to be the deadline to finish migrating to post quantum cryptography

- claudflare agrees and has moved up it's internal deadline to 2029

- same for Google, Google also seem to have prioritized quantum secure authentication over harvest now/decrypt later protections. Which IMHO implies they take that deadline quite serious.

- IBM expect some "moonshot" attacks against high value targets already in 2029 (i.e. ~one year earlier) instead of 2030.

___

Through overall what does that mean for most people?

- If you run some small low security service then probably for now nothing much. But make sure you can move to pq if the tooling (webpki, TLS, etc.) starts supporting it and keep an eye on the topic.

- For webpki, TLS and co having well working and by default supported pq cryptography is paramount. This tech isn't just powering the secure web, it's used far beyond and if broken might be enough to take over large parts of whole cloud providers.

- If you have some very sensitive material, where it's a big problem if it leaks even years later, then you have a problem. Because you probably should have already migrated to post quantum cryptography 1-2 years ago ... Note that symmetric encryption is mostly unaffected. Sure there are a lot of people saying it's "slashed in half" (e.g. 128bit => 64bit) but luckily that isn't fully true. I personally still would go with 256bit where viable, as often there is little reason not to do so. BUT a lot of the ways of sharing/accessing/deriving that secure symmetric key use cryptography which should be assumed to be broken soon.

- for VPNs if they allow complementing the asym. crypto with a symmetric key do that now (e.g. wireguard pre-shared key). But that is for many use cases a hen/egg issue as how do you securely exchange the pre-shared key? So look out for changes in the tooling/ecosystem.

- for DevOps, look out for changes in the ecosystem especially webpki/TLS/certs and look out for tools which have a high chance to not mitigate in time

- for Devs post quantum cryptography often looks like it could "just slot in" but that often isn't fully the case due to very different key sizes and performance characteristics. Look out for it. Also making you system ready to migrate to pq-safety was a recommendation by NSA and pretty much any other national cyber security agency for years by now. Furthermore with the standardization of ML-KEM the recommendation shifted to using that where viable (potentially in a hybrid KEM). So if you now notice that you never bother to check/plane ahead you probably should give it some priority now as you may be found to have acted in neglect which could in unlucky cases turn into legal liabilities.

  • ktallett ・ 4 days ago

    There are so many steps in quantum computing but there is nothing of note to suggest that we can get anywhere near building a device that outperforms HPC's at this stage.

    • dathinab ・ 3 days ago

      you seem to have a misunderstanding about how quantum computing works

      it isn't "faster" computing

      it is "different" computing

      like if you make a diagram left side "things computers can do fast", right side "thinks they can't do fast", then quantum computers are like a oval in the middle covering part of both sides

      as consequence weather it "outperforms" HPC (in general) is fully meaningless, it likely won't ever do that, but also still will break cryptography anyway

      and in general it's commonly used in conjunction with HPC, not as a replacement of it

      quantum computers working "different" instead of "faster" is also why we won't see a slow breaking/reducing of cracking time for asymmetric crypto. Because it isn't a slow buildup of speed. It's a overcoming of technical barriers. Once done breaking RSA/ECC on a 128 bit security level will pretty much instantly jump from "infeasible per key" to "in minutes per key".

      this is also why even "just" a chance of idk. arbitrary chosen 30% that it will be possible in 2030 would be too much to ignore it... especially if we consider that most computer security out there is coupled to asym. crypto not breaking in one way or another.

joko42 ・ 4 days ago

Seems like we are moving from theory to pactice faster than expected.

  • SideQuark ・ 4 days ago

    This is not a 17000 qubit general computer. Read the paper.

  • adrian_b ・ 4 days ago

    > “We can now make lots of swap gates with neutral atoms”, says Tilman Esslinger, “but of course we still need a few other ingredients to build a working quantum computer.”

  • dathinab ・ 4 days ago

    yes, while this may not be a 17k qubit computer and has ways to go to get there the insights from it will likely help us to get there faster

    and it's not the only "this is moving faster then expected new"

    a year or so(?) ago some investments happen which make only sense if there had been some unpublished break through in hardware (through you never can exclude foolish absurd high Risiko investments)

    then more recently google researchers had some break through wrt. quantum algorithms, it's not generally assumed that 10k qubits (in the right setup) are enough to break 256 elliptic curve cryptography (or 2048bit RSA) _in minutes_!

    and there also where other breakthroughs quantum computer wrt. hardware

    the general consensus of people more knowledgeable in this field seems to be going in the direction that you must _finish fully migrate to post quantum cryptography by 2029_.

    Note that this isn't a "100% guarantee there are cable quantum computers in 2030", but a "the chance of this happening is too high to not be prepared by then".

    Overall:

    - from a academic/paper background 2029 seems to be the deadline to finish migrating to post quantum cryptography

    - claudflare agrees and has moved up it's internal deadline to 2029

    - same for Google, Google also seem to have prioritized quantum secure authentication over harvest now/decrypt later protections, which implies they are seriously worried about their authentication breaking potentially as early as 2030

    - IBM expect some "moonshot" attacks against high value targets already in 2029

    ___

    Through overall what does that mean for most people?

    - if you run some small low security service then probably for now nothing, but make sure you can move to pq if the tooling (webpki, TLS, etc.) does

    - for webpki, TLS and co having well working and by default supported pq cryptography is paramount

    - if you have some very sensitive material where it's a big problem if it leaks even years later, then you have a problem because you probably should have already migrated to post quantum cryptography 1-2 years ago ... Note that symmetric encryption is mostly unaffected. Sure there are a lot of people saying it's "slashed in half" (e.g. 128bit => 64bit) but luckily that isn't fully true. I personally still would go with 256bit where viable, often there is little reason not to. BUT a lot of the ways of sharing that symmetric key use encryption which should be assumed to be broken soon.

    - for VPNs if they allow complementing the asym. crypto with a symmetric key do that now (e.g. wireguard pre-shared key) but that is for many use cases a hen/egg issue as how do you securely exchange the pre-shared key? So look out for changes in the tooling/ecosystem.

    - for DevOps, look out for changes in the ecosystem especially webpki/TLS/certs and look out for tools which have a high chance to not mitigate in time

    - for Devs post quantum cryptography often looks like it could "just slot in" but that often isn't fully the case due to very different key sizes and performance characteristics. Look out for it. Also making you system ready to migrate to pq-safety was a recommendation by NSA and pretty much any other national cyber security agency for years by now. Furthermore with the standardization of ML-KEM the recommendation shifted to using that where viable (potentially in a hybrid KEM). So if you now notice that you never bother to check/plane ahead you probably should give it some priority now as you may be found to have acted in neglect which could in unlucky cases turn into legal liabilities.