{"id":215845,"date":"2025-06-13T06:18:37","date_gmt":"2025-06-13T11:18:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/understanding-quantum-computings-most-troubling-problem-the-barren-plateau"},"modified":"2025-06-13T06:18:37","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T11:18:37","slug":"understanding-quantum-computings-most-troubling-problem-the-barren-plateau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/understanding-quantum-computings-most-troubling-problem-the-barren-plateau","title":{"rendered":"Understanding quantum computing\u2019s most troubling problem\u2014the barren plateau"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/understanding-quantum-computings-most-troubling-problem-the-barren-plateau.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For the past six years, Los Alamos National Laboratory has led the world in trying to understand one of the most frustrating barriers that faces variational quantum computing: the barren plateau.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cImagine a landscape of peaks and valleys,\u201d said Marco Cerezo, the Los Alamos team\u2019s lead scientist. \u201cWhen optimizing a variational, or parameterized, <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/quantum+algorithm\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">quantum algorithm<\/a>, one needs to tune a series of knobs that control the solution quality and move you in the landscape. Here, a peak represents a bad solution and a valley represents a good solution. But when researchers develop algorithms, they sometimes find their model has stalled and can neither climb nor descend. It\u2019s stuck in this space we call a barren <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/plateau\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">plateau<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For these quantum computing methods, barren plateaus can be mathematical dead ends, preventing their implementation in large-scale realistic problems. Scientists have spent a lot of time and resources developing quantum algorithms only to find that they sometimes inexplicably stall. Understanding when and why barren plateaus arise has been a problem that has taken the community years to solve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the past six years, Los Alamos National Laboratory has led the world in trying to understand one of the most frustrating barriers that faces variational quantum computing: the barren plateau. \u201cImagine a landscape of peaks and valleys,\u201d said Marco Cerezo, the Los Alamos team\u2019s lead scientist. \u201cWhen optimizing a variational, or parameterized, quantum algorithm, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,41,2229,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-information-science","category-mathematics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}