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Honeywell has been working toward this goal for the past decade when it began developing the technology to produce cryogenics and laser tools. In the past five years, the company assembled a team of more than 100 technologists entirely dedicated to building the machine, and in March, Honeywell announced it would be within three months — a goal it was able to meet even as the Covid-19 turned its workforce upside down and forced some employees to work remotely. “We had to completely redesign how we work in the facilities, had to limit who was coming on the site, and put in place physical barriers,” says Tony Uttley, president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions. “All of that happened at the same time we were planning on being on this race.”


The conglomerate said its machine had reached a Quantum Volume of 64, twice as powerful as IBM’s machine.

Industrial powerhouse Honeywell says its latest quantum computer is now the fastest in the world. How quickly real-world applications will develop or how swiftly they’ll be able to impact industries or affect cryptographic systems such as Bitcoin is the subject of rigorous debate.

In an announcement on Thursday, Honeywell says its team of scientists, engineers and technicians has delivered a quantum volume of 64. The metric measures both the total number of the computer’s qubits and how well it handles them. IBM’s machine scored a 32, suggesting Honeywell’s quantum computer is twice as fast.

Honeywell’s machine is designed to add up to 640,000 quantum bits (qubits) as the system scales. Tony Uttley, president of Honeywell’s quantum computing division, tells CNET.

Honeywell stock doesn’t trade on quantum fundamentals yet. Shares are down about 16% year to date, worse than the comparable drops of the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average. Honeywell is a large aerospace supplier, and the commercial aviation business has been hammered by Covid-19. Boeing (BA) stock, for instance, is off more than 40% year to date.

Honeywell stock is flat in early Friday trading. The S&P is up about 0.8%.

The quantum-computing industry hasn’t yet arrived, despite today’s announcement. But quantum computers are already better than regular computers in certain instances. Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) demonstrated the ability of its rudimentary quantum computer to beat traditional systems.

A team of researchers claim to have achieved quantum teleportation using individual electrons.

Quantum teleportation, or quantum entanglement, allows particles to affect each other even if they aren’t physically connected — a phenomenon predicted by famed physicist Albert Einstein.

Rather than a teleportation chamber out of a sci-fi movie, quantum teleportation transports information rather than matter.

“Beam me up” is one of the most famous catchphrases from the Star Trek series. It is the command issued when a character wishes to teleport from a remote location back to the Starship Enterprise.

While human teleportation exists only in , teleportation is possible in the subatomic world of quantum mechanics—albeit not in the way typically depicted on TV. In the , teleportation involves the transportation of information, rather than the transportation of matter.

Last year scientists confirmed that information could be passed between photons on even when the photons were not physically linked.

Scientists managed another breakthrough. They built a quantum computer that can execute the difficult Shor’s algorithm. It’s just five atoms big, but the experts claim it will be easy to scale it up.