Quantinuum’s H-Series hits 56 physical qubits that are all-to-all connected, and departs the era of classical simulation
In collaboration with JPMorgan Chase & Co., Quantinuum’s H2-1 achieved a massive uplift in an iconic demonstration
The first half of 2024 will go down as the period when we shed the last vestiges of the “wait and see” culture that has dominated the quantum computing industry. Thanks to a run of recent achievements, we have helped to lead the entire quantum computing industry into a new, post-classical era.
Today we are announcing the latest of these achievements: a major qubit count enhancement to our flagship System Model H2 quantum computer from 32 to 56 qubits. We also reveal meaningful results of work with our partner JPMorgan Chase & Co. that showcases a significant lift in performance.
But to understand the full importance of today’s announcements, it is worth recapping the succession of breakthroughs that confirm that we are entering a new era of quantum computing in which classical simulation will be infeasible.
A historic run
Between January and June 2024, Quantinuum’s pioneering teams published a succession of results that accelerate our path to universal fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Our technical teams first presented a long-sought solution to the “wiring problem”, an engineering challenge that affects all types of quantum computers. In short, most current designs will require an impossible number of wires connected to the quantum processor to scale to large qubit numbers. Our solution allows us to scale to high qubit numbers with no issues, proving that our QCCD architecture has the potential to scale.
Next, we became the first quantum computing company in the world to hit “three 9s” two qubit gate fidelity across all qubit pairs in a production device. This level of fidelity in 2-qubit gate operations was long thought to herald the point at which error corrected quantum computing could become a reality. It has accelerated and intensified our focus on quantum error correction (QEC). Our scientists and engineers are working with our customers and partners to achieve multiple breakthroughs in QEC in the coming months, many of which will be incorporated into products such as the H-Series and our chemistry simulation platform, InQuanto™.
Following that, with our long-time partner Microsoft, we hit an error correction performance threshold that many believed was still years away. The System Model H2 became the first – and only – quantum computer in the world capable of creating and computing with highly reliable logical (error corrected) qubits. In this demonstration, the H2-1 configured with 32 physical qubits supported the creation of four highly reliable logical qubits operating at “better than break-even”. In the same demonstration, we also shared that logical circuit error rates were shown to be up to 800x lower than the corresponding physical circuit error rates. No other quantum computing company is even close to matching this achievement (despite many feverish claims in the past 12 months).
Pushing to the limits of supercomputing … and beyond
The quantum computing industry is departing the era when quantum computers could be simulated by a classical computer. Today, we are making two milestone announcements. The first is that our H2-1 processor has been upgraded to 56 trapped-ion qubits, making it impossible to classically simulate, without any loss of the market-leading fidelity, all-to-all qubit connectivity, mid-circuit measurement, qubit reuse, and feed forward.
The second is that the upgrade of H2-1 from 32 to 56 qubits makes our processor capable of challenging the world’s most powerful supercomputers. This demonstration was achieved in partnership with our long-term collaborator JPMorgan Chase & Co. and researchers from Caltech and Argonne National Lab.
Our collaboration tackled a well-known algorithm, Random Circuit Sampling (RCS), and measured the quality of our results with a suite of tests including the linear cross entropy benchmark (XEB) – an approach first made famous by Google in 2019 in a bid to demonstrate “quantum supremacy”. An XEB score close to 0 says your results are noisy – and do not utilize the full potential of quantum computing. In contrast, the closer an XEB score is to 1, the more your results demonstrate the power of quantum computing. The results on H2-1 are excellent, revealing, and worth exploring in a little detail. Here is the complete data on GitHub.
Better qubits, better results
Our results show how far quantum hardware has come since Google’s initial demonstration. They originally ran circuits on 53 superconducting qubits that were deep enough to severely frustrate high-fidelity classical simulation at the time, achieving an estimated XEB score of ~0.002. While they showed that this small value was statistically inconsistent with zero, improvements in classical algorithms and hardware have steadily increased what XEB scores are achievable by classical computers, to the point that classical computers can now achieve scores similar to Google’s on their original circuits.
In contrast, we have been able to run circuits on all 56 qubits in H2-1 that are deep enough to challenge high-fidelity classical simulation while achieving an estimated XEB score of ~0.35. This >100x improvement implies the following: even for circuits large and complex enough to frustrate all known classical simulation methods, the H2 quantum computer produces results without making even a single error about 35% of the time. In contrast to past announcements associated with XEB experiments, 35% is a significant step towards the idealized 100% fidelity limit in which the computational advantage of quantum computers is clearly in sight.
This huge jump in quality is made possible by Quantinuum’s market-leading high fidelity and also our unique all-to-all connectivity. Our flexible connectivity, enabled by our QCCD architecture, enables us to implement circuits with much more complex geometries than the 2D geometries supported by superconducting-based quantum computers. This specific advantage means our quantum circuits become difficult to simulate classically with significantly fewer operations (or gates). These capabilities have an enormous impact on how our computational power scales as we add more qubits: since noisy quantum computers can only run a limited number of gates before returning unusable results, needing to run fewer gates ultimately translates into solving complex tasks with consistent and dependable accuracy.
This is a vitally important moment for companies and governments watching this space and deciding when to invest in quantum: these results underscore both the performance capabilities and the rapid rate of improvement of our processors, especially the System Model H2, as a prime candidate for achieving near-term value.
So what of the comparison between the H2-1 results and a classical supercomputer?
A direct comparison can be made between the time it took H2-1 to perform RCS and the time it took a classical supercomputer. However, classical simulations of RCS can be made faster by building a larger supercomputer (or by distributing the workload across many existing supercomputers). A more robust comparison is to consider the amount of energy that must be expended to perform RCS on either H2-1 or on classical computing hardware, which ultimately controls the real cost of performing RCS. An analysis based on the most efficient known classical algorithm for RCS and the power consumption of leading supercomputers indicates that H2-1 can perform RCS at 56 qubits with an estimated 30,000x reduction in power consumption. These early results should be seen as very attractive for data center owners and supercomputing facilities looking to add quantum computers as “accelerators” for their users.
Where we go next
Today’s milestone announcements are clear evidence that the H2-1 quantum processor can perform computational tasks with far greater efficiency than classical computers. They underpin the expectation that as our quantum computers scale beyond today’s 56 qubits to hundreds, thousands, and eventually millions of high-quality qubits, classical supercomputers will quickly fall behind. Quantinuum’s quantum computers are likely to become the device of choice as scrutiny continues to grow of the power consumption of classical computers applied to highly intensive workloads such as simulating molecules and material structures – tasks that are widely expected to be amenable to a speedup using quantum computers.
With this upgrade in our qubit count to 56, we will no longer be offering a commercial “fully encompassing” emulator – a mathematically exact simulation of our H2-1 quantum processor is now impossible, as it would take up the entire memory of the world’s best supercomputers. With 56 qubits, the only way to get exact results is to run on the actual hardware, a trend the leaders in this field have already embraced.
More generally, this work demonstrates that connectivity, fidelity, and speed are all interconnected when measuring the power of a quantum computer. Our competitive edge will persist in the long run; as we move to running more algorithms at the logical level, connectivity and fidelity will continue to play a crucial role in performance.
“We are entirely focused on the path to universal fault tolerant quantum computers. This objective has not changed, but what has changed in the past few months is clear evidence of the advances that have been made possible due to the work and the investment that has been made over many, many years. These results show that whilst the full benefits of fault tolerant quantum computers have not changed in nature, they may be reachable earlier than was originally expected, and crucially, that along the way, there will be tangible benefits to our customers in their day-to-day operations as quantum computers start to perform in ways that are not classically simulatable. We have an exciting few months ahead of us as we unveil some of the applications that will start to matter in this context with our partners across a number of sectors.”
– Ilyas Khan, Chief Product Officer
Stay tuned for results in error correction, physics, chemistry and more on our new 56-qubit processor.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum company, pioneers powerful quantum computers and advanced software solutions. Quantinuum’s technology drives breakthroughs in materials discovery, cybersecurity, and next-gen quantum AI. With over 500 employees, including 370+ scientists and engineers, Quantinuum leads the quantum computing revolution across continents.
By Chris Langer
Trustworthy answers are a prerequisite for useful quantum computing. First build machines that deliver answers reliably. Then focus on delivering them quickly.
A trustworthy answer also needs to arrive soon enough to be useful. But understanding how long that takes requires looking beyond the speed of any single operation.
Think about your commute: a car’s 0–60 time doesn’t tell you when you’ll arrive. Traffic, detours, and bottlenecks all affect the journey. Quantum computing works much the same way. No isolated metric, including gate speed, indicates how quickly the entire system can get the job done.
The goal of quantum computing is to solve valuable problems reliably and soon enough to matter.
At Quantinuum, we are pursuing that goal by scaling our systems and removing bottlenecks. Speed depends on how much work is required to make a computation reliable and how much of that work can happen simultaneously. We are improving how we build and operate logical qubits—an essential mechanism for complex computations—through more efficient error correction, faster qubit movement, and more parallel operations.
Understanding how these advances translate into faster answers starts with looking beyond the speed of a single gate.
The Gap Between Fast Gates and Useful Answers
Gate speed reveals how quickly a single step happens in a quantum calculation. It does not tell us how many steps are needed, how many can happen together, or how often a computation must be repeated.
An example illustrates the distinction.
Researchers from the University of Tokyo ran a small, three-qubit circuit on superconducting and trapped-ion systems.1 Armed with faster gates, the superconducting machine executed the circuit roughly 200 times faster. But it needed about 50 times more repetitions to reach comparable accuracy, reducing its practical speed advantage to approximately four times.
Faster gates led to faster answers in this example, but the headline execution speed overstated the advantage dramatically.
Even on a modestly larger circuit, the fourfold advantage could disappear entirely. A more complicated circuit means more room for errors and significantly more repetitions to overcome them. Now consider what is required of the systems, larger still, to solve real-world challenges. This calls for a move to logical qubits, which spread information across multiple physical qubits so that errors can be detected and corrected without loss.
At that scale, the question becomes how quickly the system can do useful work while keeping errors under control. The metric that tracks the rate of useful work is logical throughput, the amount of useful work a system completes per second.
What Drives Logical Throughput and Faster Answers
Logical throughput depends on logical clock rate (how quickly logical operations happen) and parallelism (how many can happen at once).
Consider two hypothetical machines: the first completes one logical operation at a time, each taking a microsecond. The second performs 1,000 independent logical operations simultaneously, each taking a millisecond. In one millisecond, each machine completes 1,000 operations. The second machine’s operations take 1,000 times longer, but parallelism offsets the difference.
Error correction takes time and physical qubits. Using both more efficiently can speed up logical operations and enable more work in parallel.
Three levers help improve that throughput:
Connectivity. Better connectivity enables error correction that is more efficient in time and space. Faster correction improves logical clock rate; fewer physical qubits per logical qubit leave room for more logical qubits. Connectivity also enables logical operations to work in parallel.
Fidelity. More reliable physical operations reduce the resources needed for error correction. This improves efficiency in space: fewer physical qubits can deliver the required logical reliability, leaving capacity for more logical qubits.
Scale. More physical qubits create room for more logical qubits. Efficient error correction, strong connectivity, and enough places to perform operations help turn that added capacity into more work happening at once. As systems scale to 1,000 logical qubits and beyond, putting more qubits to work simultaneously can help offset slower individual operations.
How Quantinuum Is Turning Scale into Speed
Faster gates, better connectivity, efficient error correction, and greater parallelism must work together. That is the thinking behind Quantinuum’s approach to scaling.
We are working to accelerate gate execution, qubit movement, and other factors while reducing unnecessary operations and improving error-correction efficiency. More efficient error correction lets us reach the required reliability with fewer resources. That means we can exploit parallelism and spend more of our extra qubits on speed.
Superconducting systems, by contrast, boast faster clock speeds, but limited connectivity forces more operations to run in sequence. That constrains the parallel capabilities of these systems, the other side of the throughput equation. Put simply, completing each step faster does not guarantee finishing the job sooner if more steps must wait their turn. Greater error-correction overhead also leaves fewer logical qubits available for computation from a given number of physical qubits. Even with more logical qubits, connectivity remains a separate constraint on how many operations can run in parallel. Together, these factors limit how effectively faster physical gates translate into faster computation.
Quantinuum’s architecture allows us to scale logical qubits and facilitate greater throughput. Maximizing the value of qubits remains an engineering challenge, which our roadmap to larger, faster machines addresses in three steps:
First, improve how qubits move. Sol, planned to launch in 2027, is our expected proving ground for a two-dimensional architecture that allows more efficient, parallel rearrangement of qubits as the system grows. Our prototypes have already demonstrated our two-dimensional geometry, operating concepts, and scalable controls work.2 We continue to improve the speed of qubit movement.
Second, create more places to work simultaneously. Adding operating zones enables more operations to run at once, increasing throughput by leveraging space.
Third, increase scale. Our planned progression from Sol to Apollo (targeted to launch in 2029) and then Lumos in the decade ahead is intended to increase physical qubit counts from approximately 200 to thousands and eventually millions.
On these larger systems, efficient error correction and connectivity-enabled parallelism will allow us to turn more qubits into dramatically higher computational throughput.
Measure the Time to a Useful Answer
As quantum computers grow, they must solve larger problems in a useful amount of time. Fast gates can’t guarantee that. Any speed advantage on a small, uncorrected circuit could vanish at the logical level. For superconducting systems, scaling this small-scale edge would mean overcoming architectural limits on connectivity and efficient error correction, which is no small feat.
For users and investors, the speed equation includes how much work the system requires, how efficiently it corrects errors, and how much computation it can perform at once. Additional qubits deliver their full value when these capabilities translate scale into increased logical throughput.
It doesn’t matter how fast you get to the wrong answer. What matters is getting the right answers efficiently. Returning to the commute analogy, we’re adding horsepower to our car and identifying the traffic detours on the road. The measure of progress will be how quickly we arrive at the destination.
References:
[1] E. Lötstedt and K. Yamanouchi, “Comparison of current quantum devices for quantum computing of Heisenberg spin chain dynamics,” Chemical Physics Letters, vol. 856, Art. no. 141817, Feb. 2024, doi: 10.1016/j.cplett.2023.141817.
[2] R. D. Delaney et al., “Scalable Multispecies Ion Transport in a Grid-Based Surface-Electrode Trap,” Physical Review X, vol. 14, no. 4, p. 041028, 2024, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevX.14.041028.
Forward-Looking Statements
This post contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These include statements about Quantinuum's technology and product roadmap; the expected timing, capabilities, and performance of future systems, including Sol, Apollo, and Lumos; anticipated improvements in error correction, qubit transport, parallelism, and logical throughput; and the potential applications of quantum computing. Words such as "will," "intend," "plan," "expect," "target," "designed to," "may," "can," "could," and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements.
These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. These risks include technical challenges in scaling quantum hardware and error correction; delays in development, manufacturing, or supply of components; the pace of customer adoption; competition and advances in alternative technologies; our ability to fund research and development; and the other risks described under "Risk Factors" in the prospectus for our initial public offering and in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, each filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this post, and we undertake no obligation to update them, except as required by law.
By: Harry Buhrman, Chief Scientist
Quantum computing is often framed as a race to the most qubits, the fastest gates, and the biggest benchmarks.
But a race needs a destination. In the fault-tolerant era, that means solving a valuable problem faster or at a lower cost than the best classical approach—and the time to solution is ultimately what matters most.
In this context, gate speed metrics have received a lot of attention. While gate speed is a meaningful component of the overall quality of a quantum computer, what actually matters most is fidelity. As we all know, speed on its own matters little if we don’t arrive at the correct destination.
Fidelity has emerged as the most important foundation for success in quantum computing. Higher fidelity means fewer errors in the underlying physical operations. Combined with quantum error correction, higher fidelity can reduce the number of additional qubits and operations needed to make computations reliable. This reduction in overhead can lower costs and shorten the time to deliver a useful answer—even compared with systems that have faster gates but lower fidelity.
Fast Gates Do Not Guarantee Fast Answers
Consider a simple example. In an independent-error model, a computation with 10,000 operations, each with an error rate of 10⁻³, or 99.9% fidelity, will experience about ten faults on average that can render the computation useless.
Now make every gate ten times faster without changing its error rate. You still get ten faults. You just get them ten times sooner.
Speed matters, but the relevant measure is the total time required to obtain a trustworthy and useful result. Getting to that point requires performance in many different and connected areas such as state preparation, measurement, error correction, repeated runs, and other work needed to complete the computation.
Gate speed alone cannot establish which system performs best. A fast machine that cannot reliably finish a sufficiently large computation cannot deliver commercial value.
Why Fidelity Changes the Resource Equation
Quantum error correction protects information by encoding it across multiple physical qubits. That protection requires resources: additional qubits, measurements, operations, and classical processing. These techniques work better when the underlying physical operations are reliable enough that increasing error protection reduces the logical error rate.
This requirement is known as the fault-tolerance threshold, the point below which physical error rates are low enough that adding protection reduces logical errors. Faster gates can shorten the computation, but they cannot replace the physical fidelity needed to cross that threshold.
At Quantinuum, our latest error-correction results on Helios demonstrate this principle. Using our error-correction architecture, logical memory errors fell exponentially as we increased protection. Across the tested code sizes, the fitted error reduction was about twelvefold for each increase of two in code distance. In the largest quantum-memory experiment, the estimated failure rate was about five in a million per error-correction cycle.1 This demonstrates how high-fidelity physical operations and effective error correction work together to make quantum information more reliable as protection grows.
The next question is what that reliability enables. How large a computation can a system complete, and how quickly can it deliver the result?
A New Performance Benchmark
The Quantum Universal Operations Performance System, or QUOPS, provides a standardized way to assess both. This architecture-neutral benchmark gauges performance by measuring computational “reach” and speed.2
“Reach” measures how large a benchmark circuit a system can execute successfully. Speed measures how quickly it executes that circuit, in effective quantum operations per second. QUOPS uses wall-clock time and accounts for extra samples and discarded runs caused by noise.
Together, these measures provide a common basis for comparing what different quantum systems deliver and tracking progress toward better time to solution.
Quantinuum’s H2 and Helios systems executed substantially larger benchmark circuits than Google’s Willow and IBM’s Boston. These superconducting systems sometimes achieved higher effective operation rates, but on smaller circuits, which means that they are not computationally comparable.
Superconducting systems can use error mitigation to tackle larger computations, but at a steep cost in speed. The QUOPS study estimates that the additional repetitions can make effective processing thousands of times slower. Some computations remain beyond the system’s reliable reach, even with mitigation. In those cases, faster gates may deliver no useful answer at all within practical limits on time and cost.
Useful applications require speed on much larger circuits. For example, the study estimates that factoring RSA-2048 or calculating FeMoco’s ground-state energy within five days would require roughly 100,000 times the computational reach demonstrated by today’s physical-qubit processors. Some machines approach the estimated speed requirement, but only on small circuits. The challenge is to sustain that speed at the required scale, including the additional work needed for error correction.
Larger uncorrected circuits accumulate more errors. Protecting them requires extra qubits and time. Reliability and speed must therefore scale together, and QUOPS offers a way to track both.
Higher Fidelity Makes Larger, Reliable Computations Possible
Improving fidelity can reduce the extra qubits and operations needed for error correction, lowering the time, cost, and resources required for useful computation. The benefit comes from reaching the required reliability with less protection, leaving more resources available for the computation itself.
Helios brings together the physical performance and error-correction capabilities needed to pursue those savings. In our paper published in Nature we showed that the system achieved an average single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.9975% and average two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.921% across its operational zones, while scaling the trapped-ion architecture to 98 fully connected physical qubits.3
The latest color-code experiments build on that physical performance. Alongside the logical memory results, protected two-qubit Clifford operations also became more reliable as protection increased. This connects improvements in the underlying hardware to improvements in logical computation.
A flexible error-correction architecture creates further opportunities to improve efficiency. Our recent Helix and color-code demonstrations used the same Helios hardware to explore different balances of accuracy and physical-qubit requirements. That flexibility allows us to evaluate which codes best suit different computational tasks as systems scale.
However, we continue to push ahead and accelerate the development of machines, such as Apollo, where quantum utility comes into play at scale. Decoding in the new color-code benchmarks was performed offline, and we are now turning our attention to integrating error correction, magic-state resources and real-time control into longer, reliable computations.
While that work continues, today’s systems can already contribute to scientific research. NISQ systems have advanced algorithms and hardware, enabled certified randomness, and supported studies of quantum magnetism and superconducting pairing correlations. These results leave room for useful applications before fault tolerance, even as error correction provides the scalable path to larger, reliable computations.4
The goal is to combine these capabilities so that larger computations can run reliably within practical limits on time and resources. Fidelity provides the foundation, and optimizing the full system turns that foundation into better time to solution.
Fidelity First. Then Optimize Time to Solution.
Scaling quantum computation requires continued progress in fidelity. As physical operations move further below threshold, increasing error protection can suppress logical errors more effectively, enabling longer, more demanding computations.
Speed must improve alongside that reliability. Advances in transport, cooling, measurement, compilation, and parallel execution can reduce the time and total cost of solving useful problems. These improvements become increasingly valuable as systems gain the reliability needed to complete larger computations.
Our latest Helios results are proof points on the path to Apollo, our planned universal fault-tolerant quantum computer, expected by 2029. The goal is to translate these gains into systems that can solve industrially relevant problems faster or at lower cost than the best classical approach.
Industrial partnerships help connect that progress to problems that matter, from understanding high-temperature superconductivity to how molecules interact to accelerate drug discovery. They bring practical research questions into the development process and help identify where improving quantum capabilities could deliver useful results beyond the reach of classical computing alone.
Our motto is simple: fidelity first, with speed built on that foundation.
References & For Further Reading
[1] A. Lavasani et al., "Quantum error correction well below the color code threshold," arXiv:2610.24077 [quant-ph] (2026). doi:10.48550/arXiv.2610.24077.
[2] T. Proctor et al., "Benchmarking the computational power of quantum computers," arXiv:2609.12146 [quant-ph] (2026). doi:10.48550/arXiv.2609.12146.
[3] A. Ransford et al., "A 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer with all-to-all connectivity," Nature 655, 81-86 (2026). doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10676-4.
[4] M. Liu, R. Shaydulin, P. Niroula et al., "Certified randomness using a trapped-ion quantum processor," Nature 640, 343-348 (2025). doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08737-1.
S. Dasu et al., "Computing with many encoded logical qubits beyond break-even," arXiv:2602.22211 [quant-ph] (2026). doi:10.48550/arXiv.2602.22211.
E. Granet et al., "Superconducting pairing correlations on a trapped-ion quantum computer," arXiv:2511.02125 [quant-ph] (2025; revised 2026). doi:10.48550/arXiv.2511.02125.
Quantinuum and GE Vernova’s Advanced Research Center are launching a collaboration to apply quantum computing to one of the research community’s most consequential challenges: understanding the behavior behind high-temperature superconductivity. Advances in this field could, over the long term, transform the energy sector by enabling lighter generators, more compact and powerful motors, and electricity infrastructure that carries more power and better withstands faults.
The research will focus on Fermi–Hubbard modeling, a framework for studying how interacting electrons give rise to complex material properties. By combining Quantinuum’s full-stack quantum computing capabilities—including access to the company’s Helios computer—with GE Vernova’s expertise in material science and engineering simulation applied to industrial applications, the collaboration will bring an industry perspective to a promising area of quantum research.
Why superconductors matter for energy
As energy systems grow, the size, weight, and performance of electrical equipment become increasingly important constraints. High-temperature superconductors offer potential ways to address those limits through their ability to carry large electrical currents without resistance under suitable operating conditions.
Potential applications span power generation, electricity grids, and industrial electrification. Superconducting generators could reduce the weight and footprint of industrial equipment. Superconducting windings could also help make utility generators and industrial or marine propulsion motors more compact and efficient. In electricity networks, superconducting cables could carry more power through constrained spaces, while fault current limiters could help protect equipment during short circuits.
Realizing those benefits more widely depends on overcoming challenges in cooling, material performance, manufacturing, and cost. Better understanding of the physics behind high-temperature superconductivity could help inform the search for materials with more practical operating characteristics.
Why quantum computing may offer new tools for understanding high-temperature superconductivity
High-temperature superconductivity involves the collective behavior of strongly interacting electrons. Accurately modeling these systems is exceptionally difficult: the interactions that make them scientifically interesting also make important aspects of their behavior computationally challenging.
The Fermi–Hubbard model captures essential features of those interactions in a simplified mathematical framework. Although it is not a complete description of a material used in industrial applications, it provides a foundation for investigating mechanisms associated with high-temperature superconductivity.
Quantum computing offers a promising way to explore the physics. Quantinuum researchers have already measured superconducting pairing correlations—including s-wave and d-wave pairing—in Fermi–Hubbard models simulated on the Helios quantum computer. These results demonstrate the ability to prepare and probe quantum states relevant to superconductivity research, establishing a foundation for further investigation.
The collaboration with GE Vernova will build on that foundation, bringing industrial expertise to the selection and interpretation of research questions.
Connecting quantum capabilities with industrial expertise
The research will be enabled through access to Quantinuum’s full-stack capabilities, including cloud-based access to Helios, the world’s most accurate quantum computer1, and Nexus, Quantinuum’s developer platform. Nexus connects quantum hardware with the software tools researchers need to develop and run applications in a unified environment.
GE Vernova’s Advanced Research Center brings the expertise in material science, engineering, and industrial applications to the research and development activity.
“High-temperature superconductors could help us overcome important limits on the size, weight, and efficiency of electrical equipment, but understanding and improving these materials remains a significant scientific challenge,” said Jonathan Owens, PhD, Senior Scientist, Computational Materials Physics at GE Vernova. “By combining our materials simulation and industrial expertise with Quantinuum’s quantum computing capabilities, we can explore new approaches to these difficult problems while building the expertise to assess where quantum computing can make a meaningful contribution.”
The collaboration also extends GE Vernova’s exploration of quantum computing into a new area of materials research while supporting the development of its internal quantum talent. Its previous published work includes investigations of quantum algorithms for carbon-capture materials using simulated quantum processors.
Building toward industrial value
Translating insights from simplified models into practical materials requires sustained scientific and engineering work. Industrial expertise helps connect that effort to the properties, operating conditions, and manufacturing considerations that ultimately determine a material’s usefulness.
For Quantinuum, this collaboration is an opportunity to advance quantum simulation with an industrial collaborator that understands both the potential applications and the barriers to adoption. It brings together demonstrated computing capabilities, a challenging materials problem, and the expertise needed to connect scientific progress with industrial requirements.
The research collaboration aims to deepen understanding of this field and explore how quantum computing may contribute to future energy technologies.
1 Based on two-qubit gate fidelity as of December 31, 2025.