King, A. D., Raymond, J., Lanting, T., Harris, R., Zucca, A., Altomare, F., Berkley, A. J., Boothby, K., Ejtemaee, S., Enderud, C., Hoskinson, E., Huang, S., Ladizinsky, E., MacDonald, A. J. R., Marsden, G., & others. (2025). Beyond-classical computation in quantum simulation. Science. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado6285
Quantum computers hold the promise of solving certain problems that lie beyond the reach of conventional computers. Establishing this capability, especially for impactful and meaningful problems, remains a central challenge. Here we show that superconducting quantum annealing processors can rapidly generate samples in close agreement with solutions of the Schrödinger equation. We demonstrate area-law scaling of entanglement in the model quench dynamics of two-, three- and infinite-dimensional spin glasses, supporting the observed stretched-exponential scaling of effort for matrix-product-state approaches. We show that several leading approximate methods based on tensor networks and neural networks cannot achieve the same accuracy as the quantum annealer within a reasonable timeframe. Thus quantum annealers can answer questions of practical importance that may remain out of reach for classical computation.