The allure of quantum computers is, at its heart, quite simple: by leveraging counterintuitive quantum effects, they could perform computational feats utterly impossible for any classical computer. But reality is more complex: to date, most claims of quantum “advantage”—an achievement by a quantum computer that a regular machine can’t match—have struggled to show they truly exceed classical capabilities. And many of these claims involve contrived tasks of minimal practical use, fueling criticisms that quantum computing is at best overhyped and at worst on a road to nowhere. Now, however, a team of researchers from JPMorganChase, quantum computing firm Quantinuum, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Texas at Austin seems to have shown a genuine advantage that’s relevant to real-life issues of online security. The group’s results, published recently in Nature, build upon a previous certification protocol—a way to check that random numbers were generated fairly—developed by U.T. Austin computer scientist Scott Aaronson and his former postdoctoral researcher Shih-Han Hung. Using a Quantinuum-developed quantum computer in tandem with classical, or traditional, supercomputers at Argonne and Oak Ridge, the team demonstrated a technique that achieves what is called certified randomness.

Full research : Quantinuum’s 56-bit trapped-ion computer has succeeded in demonstrating randomness in quantum circuits to establish secure, private connections.