A team of scientists at USC has verified that quantum effects are indeed at play in the first commercial quantum optimization processor.

The team demonstrated that the D-Wave processor housed at the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center behaves in a manner that indicates that quantum mechanics has a functional role in the way it works. The demonstration involved a small subset of the chip’s 128 qubits.

In other words, the device appears to be operating as a quantum processor — something that scientists had hoped for but have needed extensive testing to verify.

The quantum processor was purchased from Canadian manufacturer D-Wave nearly two years ago by Lockheed Martin and housed at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) based at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. As the first of its kind, the task for scientists putting it through its paces was to determine whether the quantum computer was operating as hoped.

“Using a specific test problem involving eight qubits, we have verified that the D-Wave processor performs optimization calculations [that is, finds lowest-energy solutions] using a procedure that is consistent with quantum annealing and is inconsistent with the predictions of classical annealing,” said Daniel Lidar, scientific director of the Quantum Computing Center and one of the researchers on the team. Lidar holds joint appointments at USC Viterbi and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.