Simon Martiel

Picture an orchestra of 120 musicians playing in perfect unison — one false note and the harmony crumbles. That's the metaphor for a record-breaking quantum ensemble. Physicists have for the first time entangled 120 superconducting qubits, the building blocks of future computers.

IBM's Heron R3 quantum computer handled a task that made a classical method back down. The challenge was finding the ground state, the lowest energy level, of a system of 49 quantum bits.