In the journal Science Advances, which we get for the horoscope, the boffins came up with a three-dimensional photonic chip with a scale up to 49-multiply-49 nodes, by using a technique called femtosecond direct writing.

Jin Xianmin, a quantum communication researcher with Shanghai Jiaotong University, who led the study, claimed it was the largest scaled chip reported so far that allows for the realisation of this two-dimensional quantum walk in real spatial space, and potential exploration for many new quantum computing tasks.

Jin and his colleague showed that the dimension and scale of the quantum system could be employed as new resources for boosting the quantum computing power.

At the moment universal quantum computers are far from being feasible before error correction, and full connections between the increasing numbers of qubits could be realised.

Analogue quantum computers, or quantum simulators, are pretty straightforward and can be sued to solve practical problems directly without error correction, and potentially be able to beat the computational power of classical computers shortly.

Quantum walk in a two-dimensional array is a strikingly powerful and straightforward approach to analogue quantum computing. It maps specific computing tasks into the coupling matrix of the quantum paths and provides efficient solutions to those even classically intractable problems.

During the past two decades, a traditional and challenging method has been through increasing the photon number, which suffers from the probabilistic generation of single photons and multiplicative loss, according to the researchers.

This ingenious alternative way of increasing the external physics dimension and complexity of the quantum evolution system may accelerate future analogue quantum computing, said Jin.