Singapore Lab Rehearses a Demonstration It Has Not Yet Run

SINGAPORE — Inside a shielded hall at the Singapore Institute, a processor the institute hopes to demonstrate over the Q-Net backbone next month sat this week in calibration, not performance. Dr. Wei-Lin Tan, the physicist guiding a small press cohort past the cryostats, was pointed about what the visit was not. "We have not run the full demonstration. Anyone reporting that we have is ahead of the machine." The planned showing — a million-qubit device operating across the quantum-secured network — would be a milestone, though Tan repeated the standing caution that Q-Net secures a channel and does not send information faster than light. Markets have already priced the event the lab has not staged, a gap Tan called "the oldest problem in physics finance." For now the machine holds at temperatures near absolute zero, its error rates logged hourly by a team of nineteen. This week the logs recorded a single-qubit error rate of 0.02 percent, Tan said — the figure the team wants steady before it will set a demonstration date.