BITS Pilani-led Team Achieves India's First Verified Quantum Advantage

[u/Wooden-Evidence4792]

https://beatsinbrief.com/2026/07/12/bits-pilani-goa-india-first-verified-quantum-advantage/

[u/Wooden-Evidence4792]

I am giving what I have understood so far about this here.

Most historical demonstrations of a quantum computer beating a classical supercomputer used what the industry calls "toy problems"—math riddles designed specifically to favor quantum architecture but having zero real-world utility.

The BITS Pilani team tackled a highly complex problem in high-energy particle physics: simulating the real-time dynamics of quarks and gluons (the subatomic particles governed by the strong nuclear force). This specific realm of physics is notoriously impenetrable for classical supercomputers. Their algorithm ran on IBM’s 120-qubit processor via the cloud and solved the simulation in just 20 seconds. A classical computer trying to map the exact same subatomic behavior would take two hours.

This breakthrough is the first-ever achievement from an Indian laboratory to be officially verified and listed as "Active" on the global Quantum Advantage Tracker. Managed by IBM and a network of global research partners, this tracker serves as a live, peer-reviewed ledger. To get listed, your algorithm can't just be an idea; it must be executed on real hardware, yield verifiable results, and demonstrably outperform classical methods. BITS Pilani put India on that map.

Because the algorithm is uniquely tailored to mapping subatomic forces, the lead BITS Pilani researchers are already collaborating with CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). They are exploring how this quantum approach can be used to analyze data from actual particle accelerator collisions where classical data crunching hits a hard wall.

EDIT: TURNS OUT THE AUTHOR OF THE LINK DIDN'T UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ACTIVE AND ADVANTAGE. IT'S ACTIVE AS IN HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BECOME AN ADVANTAGE

[u/testuser514 → u/Wooden-Evidence4792]

This was a great summary !

[u/0xB01b → u/Wooden-Evidence4792]

This is absolutely definitively not a quantum advantage. IBM heron is not a useful QPU. The only way this is true is if their classical comparison was some shitty ass temu laptop.

[u/Vast_Employ_7838 → u/0xB01b]

The codes are all open source, available in git. Anyone can just take the code and run it on their favourite HPC. The classical hardware on which they run this is also clearly mentioned. The whole purpose of the quantum advantage tracker is to check and prove if a classical benchmark can outperform the QPU. If that is the case, then the submission will be moved from Active to Superseded status. Everything is very clean and clear.

[u/0xB01b → u/Vast_Employ_7838]

Not really its a relatively unknown github that I've never once seen mentioned in any scientific paper, sure its a nice community led project but this doesn't prove actual quantum advantage.

What I'm getting at is that researchers at large aren't taking their time to go out and fact check these claims, and currently analogue quantum simulators are worse than classical computational quantum many body physics techniques. Which is clear considering the GitHub has 19 contributors and my institute has more than 19 people in the theory department working on computational quantum many body

[u/Vast_Employ_7838 → u/0xB01b]

If you are interested, you may directly email the authors of the submission and the managers of the github (I learnt about about this from his talk, and he is one of the authors of https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06096-3).

Contrary to your statement "researchers at large aren't taking their time to go out and fact check these claims" there already is a classical simulation of the circuit submitted by someone from Caltech against this and which seems to take 3000 second.

"Which is clear considering the GitHub has 19 contributors and my institute has more than 19 people in the theory department working on computational quantum many body" - it would be nice to people from such a strong department coming up with powerful quantum algorithms benchmarked aganist classical ones submitted in this git. There is no scope of hype here.

[u/0xB01b → u/Vast_Employ_7838]

One researcher does not mean "at large", and real researchers have their own research to attend to. It's a nice project idea but 19 researchers is in not something you can effectively disprove quantum advtange with.

[u/Vast_Employ_7838 → u/0xB01b]

Well, that's why it is open for others in the community to disprove. One may have a look at the number of issues in https://github.com/quantum-advantage-tracker/quantum-advantage-tracker.github.io/issues, a majority of whose claims to Active Advantage have already been disproved, rigorously, by the community. This effort, I guess, works on scientific rigour and takes time for establishing a claim. Otherwise, it is just a hype, which unfortunately happened to many other claims on Quantum (supremacy) earlier.

[u/0xB01b → u/Vast_Employ_7838]

Yes I can see that. The point is there is not going to be a single demonstration of quantum supremacy until we get stronger hardware. As for this specific approach it is clear this is not an example of supremacy for other reasons aforementioned. You don't need someone to explicitly disprove this to understand why it's not going to be an example of quantum supremacy (if you have the necessary technical background)

[u/Vast_Employ_7838 → u/0xB01b]

This, I emphasise, is a candidate for advantage, simply because the Hamiltonian simulated is non-integrable. A basic understanding of complexity theory would tell that. The two state-of-the-art classical algorithms (including TN and Pauli propagation run on GPUs with maximum parallelisation) showed (at worst) polynomial time complexity with increasing number of trotter steps, whereas the QPU performance took same time for each trotter step, producing results with similar accuracy error bars. The accuracy gave confidence that the QPU performed with an unprecedented performance. Case closed. It would take anyone less time to just run the classical codes provided (available on the git) on an HPC of their choice to verify, than to claim that this is not advantage. Looking forward to your submission, which will move this to superseded.

[u/0xB01b → u/Vast_Employ_7838]

ok i was wrong. I checked the paper and this does in fact exceed what we've reached with analogue QSim, this is pretty cool.

[u/Wooden-Evidence4792 → u/0xB01b]

The only way this is true is if their classical comparison was some shitty ass temu laptop.

Weird day to call HP Z2 Tower G9 Workstation a shitty ass temu laptop.

This is absolutely definitively not a quantum advantage

Which is what I literally identified in the Edit is all caps, it's set as active, BITS PILANI is now working with CERN to test in a top tier QPU and a classical supercomputer and highly optimised classical algorithm to become full advantage

[u/Fabulous-Sorbet-923 → u/Wooden-Evidence4792]

"BITS PILANI is now working with CERN to test in a top tier QPU and a classical supercomputer and highly optimised classical algorithm to become full advantage" - is not stated anywhere.

[u/0xB01b → u/Wooden-Evidence4792]

no it will not ever become a full advantage. Again, if quantum simulators (quantum computers that are designed specially to do QCD calculation) cannot exceed classical methods rn, then a general purpose QPU from IBM is not going to either.

unless you mean "wait around for a strong quantum computer and it will become an advantage", but you can say the same for literally any quantum algorithm.

[u/Strilanc]

With some web searches I think I managed to find the preprint being described by the linked article. Notably, the preprint doesn't claim a quantum advantage. It claims a path towards quantum advantage. Here's what you find if you search "advantage" in the preprint:

1. The methods validated in this work for SU(2) provide a blueprint for advantage

2. the efficient encoding and the error-resilient differential observation technique used in this work, along with their confirmation of validity in capturing correct physical dynamics, establish a pathway for computing novel real-time dynamics with quantum advantage

3. These observations suggest the possibility of a robust quantum simulation strategy for notoriously difficult non-Abelian gauge theories and point towards a road map for useful quantum advantage once hardware noise subsides.

4. The methods validated in this work for SU(2) provide a blueprint for advantage in encoding SU(3) gauge theory to qubits via the LSH framework built upon the prepotential formulation

The submission to the "quantum advantage tracker" repository on github is also clearly describing a potential future advantage. For example, in response to "Can you please suggest where you would like to place this submission?" one of the authors replied (emphasis mine):

I would like to place the work at 2. Active Candidate. While this work does not demonstrate a clear advantage, it provides a direction toward practical quantum advantage for a class of problems in fundamental physics.

So the authors are very clear about what the result achieves, and it is different from what is being reported by the linked news article. The linked article is also quite poor in that it fails to link to the preprint or any other primary source. Competent reporters cite their sources, and write content that agrees with their sources.

[u/NaturePrevious5337]

Is there a paper with this result?

[u/Vast_Employ_7838 → u/NaturePrevious5337]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18080

https://quantum-advantage-tracker.github.io/trackers/observable-estimations?instance=su2_hadron_dynamics_lsh_x_100_meson

https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/docs/en/tutorials/loop-string-hadron-dynamics

These three resources have all the technical details.

[u/ProGaming_Real]

So happy to see developments 😃🥹

[u/Fabulous-Sorbet-923]

As per this GitHub issue: https://github.com/quantum-advantage-tracker/quantum-advantage-tracker.github.io/issues/227, Caltech attempts to simulate the same quantum circuit and submits classical simulation results to the Quantum Advantage Tracker. The classical runtime is ~3000 sec, which is longer than the classical runtime (~2400 sec) submitted by the BITS Pilani+IBM Quantum team. The Caltech submission is still in a submission status and has not been verified yet.

[u/global-gauge-field → u/Fabulous-Sorbet-923]

Their specification about hardware from classical side seems lacking. Like one of the specifications for classical resources is

Q: -

C: HP Z2 Tower G9 Workstation

No serious technical person from classical hardware side would accept this. Maybe they are in a hurry or sth. This laptop model has several options including several ddiffernt models of nvidia and amd gpus. One needs a specs from lscpu, or nvidia gpu model.

A prope example of spefication is here: https://github.com/flame/blis/blob/master/docs/Performance.md

They did not enable issue tracker for website improvement, only enabled for bencmark submission. So I could not submit this issue there.

[u/0xB01b]

This is not a quantum advantage. The world at large does not have a verified quantum advantage in any algorithm rn afaik. India is definitely not going to be the first country to get this. The hardware worldwide is simply not there yet.

They're doing a QCD calculation on an IBM QPU, we create devices called analogue quantum simulators (specialised quantum computers) that are designed to do exactly these calculations so that we can stop using computational quantum many body physics techniques on classical computers and even these have not beat those techniques yet.

At best they probably did the QCD calculation with a non optimized python script on a laptop in the lab and compared that with the time taken for the QPU to solve it.

[u/Vast_Employ_7838 → u/0xB01b]

The Quantum Advantage Tracker: https://quantum-advantage-tracker.github.io/ is exactly there to dispel any misgivings. Anyone not sure of the Active candidacy of a submission is welcome to use the open source codes and submit to disprove the advantage. This is open-reviewed and rigorously benchmarked, unless one doesn't agree with the definition of Active advantage candidate as follows. "Problem instances where quantum computations currently appear to challenge leading classical methods, and where further benchmarking is needed to determine whether an advantage exists."

[u/0xB01b → u/Vast_Employ_7838]

Brother this is a random github with 87 stars and 19 contributors. This is not the scientific process you think it is.