China makes world's first quantum computer

Chinese scientists have successfully built the world's first quantum computing machine that is 24,000 times faster than its international counterparts and may dwarf the processing power of existing supercomputers.

The scientists announced their achievement at a press conference in the Shanghai Institute for Advanced Studies of University of Science and Technology of China.

Quantum computing could in some ways dwarf the processing power of today's supercomputers.

The manipulation of multi-particle entanglement is the core of quantum computing technology and has been the focus of international quantum computing research.

Recently, Pan Jianwei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lu Chaoyang and Zhu Xiaobo of the University of Science and Technology of China and Wang Haohua of Zhejiang University set international records in quantum control of the maximal numbers of entangled photonic quantum bits and entangled superconducting quantum bits.

Pan said quantum computers could, in principle, solve certain problems faster than classical computers.

Despite substantial progress in the past two decades, building quantum machines that can actually outperform classical computers in some specific tasks - an important milestone termed "quantum supremacy" - remains challenging.