Aurora

The world's first scalable, networked and modular quantum computer

Four modular server racks, photonically interconnected and networked together. 35 photonic chips and 13 km of fiber, all operating at room temperature.

Read the Nature paper Watch the video

Why it matters

Built to scale to a quantum data center

With this breakthrough, Aurora could in principle be scaled up to thousands of server racks and millions of qubits today, realizing the ultimate goal of a quantum data center.

It is the very first time we—or anyone, for that matter—have combined all the subsystems necessary to implement universal and fault-tolerant quantum computation in a photonic architecture.

Qubits

Photonic chips

13 km

Of fiber optics

Room-temperature server racks

Inside Aurora

A complete prototype of a universal photonic quantum computer

Breakdown of Aurora: the laser system and three compute-module racks, with one module exploded into its sources, fiber delays, refinery and QPU chips

Aurora's server racks in Xanadu's Toronto lab

Scalable, modular, networkable

A truly useful quantum computer will require a very large number of physical qubits, necessitating an approach that includes a clear template for scaling up. Modularity is thus crucial: there must be a straightforward way to distribute the qubits amongst discrete modules that can be mass-manufactured independently. And modularity is useless without the ability to network the modules together. Aurora is a powerful demonstration of all three.

Put to the test

In one trial, we ran the system continuously for two hours and monitored the entanglement present in the cluster state over 86 billion modes—the largest number ever accessed in a context like this. Quantum correlations were also used to verify that the single-clock-cycle decoding functions were working properly.

The two big challenges remaining for the industry are the improved performance of the quantum computer (error correction and fault tolerance) and scalability (networking). Xanadu has now solved scalability. Photonics really is the best and most natural way to both compute and network.

Christian Weedbrook

Founder and CEO, Xanadu