IBM's Nighthawk quantum processor has been evaluated in two practical applications: a model of particle physics and cybersecurity traffic filtering, as reported by Quantum Computing Report.
In the first experiment, researchers focused on solving a physical problem—specifically, the interaction between a nucleon and an antinucleon within a simplified quantum chromodynamics model known as QCD2. They utilized a spin chain decomposition and executed the model on the Nighthawk processor. The results showed the expected attractive interaction potential, aligning with classical methods like exact diagonalization. The team highlighted their success in extracting meaningful signals from noisy data through structural error compensation.
The second experiment addressed a real-world cybersecurity challenge: distinguishing between malicious denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) traffic and legitimate connections. Researchers transformed this problem into a graph optimization task, employing the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) to analyze logs from a honeypot system.
