Singapore Readies a Million-Qubit Demonstration for This Weekend

SINGAPORE — The Singapore Institute confirmed this week that it will attempt, in the coming days, to run a million-qubit processor over the Q-Net backbone — a demonstration that, if it holds, would mark the largest coherent quantum system yet operated on the secured network. The Institute stressed the result is not yet in hand. "We are staging a demonstration, not announcing a triumph," said Dr. Wei-Lin Tan, the physicist fronting the program, who reminded reporters that Q-Net secures the channel but transmits no information faster than light. The scale is the story: error rates that were tolerable at a thousand qubits compound cruelly at a million, and a single technician's calibration can decide the run. For lab engineer Priya Menon, checking cryostat lines at 3 a.m., the weekend is prosaic. "We test, it holds or it doesn't," she said. "The physics does not care about the press release."