China’s Jiuzhang 4.0 quantum system sets photon record

Thursday 14 May 2026 - 14:52

By: Dakir Madiha

China’s Jiuzhang 4.0 quantum system sets photon record

A team of scientists in China has developed a programmable quantum computing prototype that manipulates thousands of photons at once, marking a major milestone in optical quantum information processing. The system, called Jiuzhang 4.0, was created by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and is described as a significant step forward in the global race to build practical quantum computers. The findings were published in a leading scientific journal on Wednesday.

Jiuzhang 4.0 is designed to perform boson sampling, a complex mathematical benchmark used to demonstrate quantum advantage. According to the research team, the system solved a boson sampling task at a speed exceeding 10^54 times that of the most powerful classical supercomputers. It processed and detected quantum states involving up to 3,050 photons, representing a twelvefold increase compared with the previous Jiuzhang 3.0 system, which handled 255 photons.

To reach this scale, researchers integrated 1,024 high-efficiency squeezed-state optical fields into a hybrid spatiotemporal circuit with 8,176 modes. This architecture combines spatial pathways with temporal delay loops, allowing the system to scale without requiring a proportional increase in physical hardware. Scientists say this design significantly expands computational capacity while maintaining optical stability and efficiency.

The system also achieved a reported source efficiency of 92 percent and generated its most complex data samples in just 25 microseconds. Researchers stated that classical simulation methods, including advanced tensor decomposition techniques, are unable to keep pace with the system’s performance at this scale. The team compared the computation gap to classical supercomputers requiring timescales far beyond the age of the universe to reproduce similar results.

Jiuzhang 4.0 builds on earlier versions of the series first introduced in 2020, which progressively increased photon detection capacity and demonstrated incremental gains in quantum advantage. While boson sampling remains a specialized benchmark rather than a general computing application, researchers say the latest results bring photonic quantum systems closer to the threshold required for universal quantum computing architectures.