News | RPI’s IBM Quantum System One gets Nighthawk r1 chip

RPI’s IBM Quantum System One was unveiled at the Voorhees Computing Center in April 2024 as the first IBM Quantum System One installed at a university, which originally ran on IBM's 127-qubit Eagle processor. This system has now been upgraded from the Eagle processor to the 120-qubit Nighthawk r1, as of August 15, 2026.

In an interview with The Polytechnic, RPI Future of Computing Institute Research Scientist Dr. Cameron Cogburn described running a calculation that modeled the interaction between a kink and an anti-kink. Kink-anti-kink potentials are a simplified system used to study quantum chromodynamics, which is the theory of the strong nuclear force. Circuit noise on the Eagle chip had caused the result to diverge from the expected physical interactions; whereas on Nighthawk r1 the output closely matched the numerical solution. 

The difference between the two chips is how their qubits are physically connected. IBM's previous heavy hex architecture, on the Eagle and Heron, limited most qubits to two or three direct neighbors. Nighthawk arranges qubits in a two-dimensional grid, giving each qubit three to four neighbors. This reduces the need for SWAP operations, where a qubit that is not adjacent to the one it needs to interact with is moved into the correct position through a series of operations, each of which introduces additional noise into calculations. In his kink-and-anti-kink calculation, Dr. Cogburn was able to arrange data and measurement qubits so that few or no swaps were required with the new chip, which he said was a primary factor in the improved result.