Algorithmiq and IBM have announced a major milestone in the development of quantum computing: a joint demonstration of quantum advantage with the simulation of a heterogeneous quantum material, achieved with a new framework that establishes trust in quantum computations when classical verification is unavailable.
Eight months after this problem and results were first released through the launch of the Quantum Advantage Tracker, no classical method has been able to reliably produce results across the full problem regime studied in this work. It demonstrates that quantum computers can provide trusted solutions more efficiently, more cheaply, or more accurately than leading classical compute methods — which has long been considered a key milestone in the field.
Studying Information Flow in Heterogenous Quantum Matter
Real materials, including catalysts and battery electrolytes, are defined not by perfect crystalline order but by irregular structures, interfaces, and local variations that strongly influence how information, energy, and particles move through the system. To study these effects, a team led by senior scientist Sergey Filippov in Algorithmiq’s R&D division, which is headed by co-founder & Chief Scientific Officer Guillermo García-Pérez, developed a model of heterogeneous quantum matter in which information propagates through regions with different local properties. The resulting dynamics were deliberately positioned in a regime that is experimentally accessible on today’s quantum hardware but demanding for leading classical simulation techniques.
The model, when executed on an IBM Quantum Heron processor, effectively captured a programmable quantum material whose microscopic couplings could be tuned and reconfigured at will, so that researchers can control where information flows, localizes, or interferes, as it would in a real material.
Solving Quantum Computing’s Trust Problem
Quantum results have traditionally earned trust the same way: by checking them against a classical simulation. To do so, Algorithmiq’s software engineering team collaborated with world-leading classical simulation researchers to explore different simulation approaches. The various classical methods produced conflicting predictions among themselves for the same quantities. In the absence of an exact solution, the challenge was not only to outperform classical computation, but also to determine which result could be trusted.
To address this challenge, the team developed a new framework for trusted quantum computation in the beyond-classical era, laying down a blueprint for scientific discovery. A central part of this strategy was noise manipulation and building a representative model of the underlying noise in the device. Researchers deliberately changed the noise affecting the quantum circuits, including through controlled noise injection, modified gate calibrations, and execution on multiple IBM Quantum processors. This showed that the quantum results remained stable — providing evidence that the quantum computers were producing consistent solutions. With extensively tested noise models, they also demonstrated a path to stand-alone validation using unbiased error mitigation techniques with quantified uncertainty.
Open Sourcing the Benchmark
Algorithmiq is also today releasing monoprop, which makes its best classical method for simulating molecular ground states available to the wider research community — the same techniques it has used to test and challenge quantum advantage claims, including its own. The package is designed to let any research group, quantum or classical, stress-test future advantage claims rather than take them on faith.
Sabrina Maniscalco, co-founder and CEO, Algorithmiq, said, “For an exponential technology like quantum computing, a verified, openly contested instance of advantage is the inflection point: proof the curve is real, not projected. Demonstrating quantum advantage is an ongoing process, not a single moment, but we believe these results represent our strongest claim published to date and will come to be seen as a major milestone in the evolution of quantum computing.”
Matteo Rossi, co-founder and CTO, Algorithmiq, commented, “This collaboration with IBM has realized an idea first proposed by Richard Feynman in 1982. By simulating quantum matter using a digital quantum processor built from the same physics, we’re able to give researchers a tunable, physically interesting model open to anyone who wants to try to disprove it classically. It is a demanding test case, and it has withstood open challenge for eight months and counting.”
Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, said, “Quantum computers have reached the point at which they can show evidence of the fundamental criteria for advantage: they can outperform leading classical methods, and they can simultaneously produce results that we can trust. I look forward to continued benchmarking of these results by the community on the Quantum Advantage Tracker, and progress towards rigorous error bars for quantum methods.This is a pivotal milestone in the future of quantum computers as we look towards scaling well beyond what could ever be possible with classical computers alone — and further explore new realms of physics, materials, life sciences, and much more.”
More Demonstrations of Quantum Advantage Emerge
Today, alongside this milestone from IBM and Algorithmiq, partners from across IBM’s ecosystem are announcing more demonstrations of quantum advantage with trusted computations.
IBM and Qedma Demo Quantum Advantage
Qedma Quantum Computing, a pioneer in quantum error reduction software and IBM has announced a breakthrough study demonstrating how trusted, error-mitigated quantum computation is possible, and can be used to explore the physics of materials beyond the capabilities of state-of-the-art classical simulations, including those run on one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
By combining Qedma’s advanced error mitigation software, QESEM, with IBM quantum computers, researchers observed complex and long-lived quantum dynamics in systems of up to 74 qubits. This enabled them to reach a paradigm where multiple state-of-the-art classical approaches failed to provide consistent, reliable answers.
The results mark the first time quantum advantage has been achieved with commercially available hardware and software to establish error-mitigated, advanced quantum computers as trusted scientific instruments for exploring physics that could lead to better and ultrafast optoelectronics, light-induced superconductors, and other advanced materials applications.
Exploring Physics at the Classical Frontier
The collaboration investigated the subtle, oscillatory dynamics of a two-dimensional Floquet Ising model, which is a system that physicists use to study how a material’s magnetic properties evolve when rhythmically driven by external pulses. Understanding whether such oscillations persist in larger systems has remained an open challenge because the relevant regimes rapidly overwhelm classical computational methods. Using an IBM quantum computer, which is powered by the IBM Quantum Heron processor and available on the cloud, together with Qedma’s Quantum Error Suppression and Error Mitigation (QESEM) software, which is also available on the cloud, the team was able to resolve these dynamics with precision.
Beyond Leading Classical Methods
To evaluate the significance of the quantum results, the team worked with RIKEN, Japan’s leading national comprehensive research institute, and BlueQubit, a leading developer of large-scale quantum circuit simulation technology, to compare them against state-of-the-art classical simulation approaches that spanned fundamentally different computational strategies. As the system grew in complexity over time, none of the classical approaches could consistently agree at the scale reached by the quantum experiments, even when run on Fugaku, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. By contrast, the error-mitigated quantum results remained consistent and revealed clear, long-time oscillatory behavior. To enable continued classical benchmarking from the community, the team publicly released the quantum circuits and results to the Quantum Advantage Tracker, prior to the arXiv pre-print released this week.
Building Trust Through Validation
A defining feature of the study is its extensive validation strategy. The team first employed an unbiased error-mitigation protocol against classical calculations wherever such comparisons remained possible, before pushing the protocol to the point where these classical simulations lost accuracy. Then, they benchmarked a more scalable mitigation approach against those trusted results before extending to larger system sizes and longer evolution times. Independent validation was also performed across quantum hardware platforms, including trapped-ion systems from Quantinuum. The consistent behavior observed across technologies provided additional evidence that the measured physics originated from the simulated quantum system, rather than from device-specific or mitigation errors.
“IBM quantum computers have reached a maturity where they can produce solutions that, for the first time, achieve both trust in the solution through extensive testing and outperform the best classical simulation methods. I look forward to seeing future results benchmarked through the Quantum Advantage Tracker as we deepen our understanding of the boundary between quantum and classical computation,” said Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow. “By combining IBM’s quantum computers with Qedma’s advanced error reduction technology, we are transforming quantum computing into a practical tool to expand the frontier of knowledge.”
“For decades, quantum computing has promised discoveries beyond the reach of classical computers. Today, we’re beginning to see that promise become reality,” said Dr. Asif Sinay, CEO and co-founder of Qedma. “By leveraging Qedma’s software to make today’s quantum computers significantly more powerful and reliable, we’re helping move the quantum computing industry closer to real-world, commercial impact.”
“Quantum computers are beginning to open new possibilities for scientific discovery within the high-performance computing environment,” said Dr. Mitsuhisa Sato, Division Director of the Quantum-HPC Hybrid Platform Division, RIKEN Center for Computational Science. “This work leveraged RIKEN’s leadership in advanced classical simulation and supercomputing, alongside Qedma’s error mitigation software on IBM quantum computers, to demonstrate the ability of quantum computing to surpass the capabilities of leading classical methods. It is an important step towards a future where quantum and classical computing work together to advance science.”
Qedma’s advanced error reduction software, QESEM, available in the Qiskit Functions Catalog on the IBM Quantum Platform, mitigates the impact of noise present in today’s quantum computers. Rather than waiting for large-scale, fully fault-tolerant quantum computers, QESEM’s patented approach unlocks the ability to execute larger and more complex quantum workloads while producing more accurate results. The software offers various error mitigation methods, including an unbiased approach which provides guaranteed accuracy in extracting reliable results from noisy quantum hardware. It is currently being used by leading enterprises, academic institutions, and research laboratories around the world.
