Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor

This landmark experiment uses Google’s programmable Sycamore superconducting processor to perform random-circuit sampling with 53 active qubits. The resulting probability distributions were verified against classical simulations for circuits that remained tractable, while the largest benchmark was reported to require vastly more time on then-state-of-the-art classical supercomputers. The work demonstrated a computational task performed substantially faster on the quantum processor and became a major reference point for studying the boundary between quantum computation and classical simulation.