Researchers have put IBM's Nighthawk quantum processor through two applied tests: a simplified particle physics model and the filtering of malicious traffic. The experiments were highlighted by Quantum Computing Report.
In the first study, the team aimed not just to "run qubits" but to compute a physical problem—the interaction between a nucleon and an antinucleon in a simplified model of quantum chromodynamics, QCD2. They decomposed the system into a spin chain and executed it on Nighthawk. The resulting interaction potential demonstrated the expected attraction and matched the results from classical checks—exact diagonalization and ideal simulation. The authors emphasized that they extracted useful signals from noisy data through structural error compensation.
The second study focused on cybersecurity, tackling a more practical case: separating malicious DoS and DDoS traffic from legitimate connections without disrupting them. Researchers utilized logs from a honeypot system and transformed the task into a graph optimization problem, which they solved using the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA).
The experiments involved graphs with 16, 32, 66, and 110 events. The largest variant—110 nodes and 181 edges—was run on three IBM backends from the IBM Quantum Network. According to the summary from Quantum Computing Report, Nighthawk required the fewest two-qubit operations and had the lowest compilation overhead, while the Heron-based processor achieved the best target metric.
The authors of both studies do not claim quantum advantage. They present the results as an applied benchmark, assessing how suitable such systems are for tasks where both computational accuracy and noise resilience are crucial.
As a reminder, in June, IBM researchers discussed a new approach to finding quantum error correction codes using large language models.