In 2019, Sycamore completed a task in 200 seconds thatGoogle claimed, in aNature paper, would take a state-of-the-art supercomputer 10,000 years to finish. Thus, Google claimed to have achievedquantum supremacy. To estimate the time that would be taken by a classical supercomputer, Google ran portions of the quantum circuit simulation onSummit, one of the most powerful classical computers in the world.[3][4][5][6][7][8] Later,IBM made a counter-argument, claiming that the task would take only 2.5 days on a classical system like Summit.[9][10] If Google's claims are upheld, then it would represent a huge leap in computing power.[11][12][13]
In August 2020, quantum engineers working for Google reported the largest chemical simulation on a quantum computer – aHartree–Fock approximation with Sycamore paired with a classical computer that analyzed results to provide new parameters for the 12-qubit system.[14][15][16]
In April 2021, researchers working with Sycamore reported that they were able to realize the ground state of thetoric code, atopologically ordered state, with 31 qubits. They showed long-range entanglement properties of the state by measuring non-zerotopological entropy, simulatinganyon interferometry and their braiding statistics, and preparing a topologicalquantum error correcting code with one logical qubit.[17]
In July 2021, a collaboration consisting of Google and multiple universities reported the observation of a discretetime crystal on the Sycamore processor. The chip of 20 qubits was used to obtain amany-body localization configuration of up and down spins. The configuration was stimulated with a laser to achieve a periodically driven "Floquet" system where all up spins are flipped for down and vice versa in periodic cycles which are multiples of the laser's cycles. No energy was absorbed from the laser so the system remained in aprotected eigenstate order.[18][19]
In 2022, the Sycamore processor was used to simulatetraversable wormhole dynamics.[20] For a discussion of the Sycamore processor's role in recent quantum gravity and holographic wormhole experiments, see Galina Weinstein, Einstein's Legacy: From General Relativity to Black Hole Mysteries (Springer, 2025)[21]
The GermanForschungszentrum Jülich cooperated with Google in developing the Sycamore quantum computer, and it will be home to the first universal quantum computer developed in Europe as part of the OpenSuperQ project.[22][23]
