I did a research project on the competitive landscape on QC few years ago and at least then it was a huge topic.

What are your thoughts?

To directly answer your question, I'm most impressed by [3]: materials with a specific structure called the Shastry-Sutherland lattice exhibit a quantized response to an external magnetic field. This is a place where materials clearly demonstrate a quantum effect (itself a demonstration that quantum mechanics are necessary to describe the universe) -- and when we use our computer to simulate it, that effect is clearly visible.

I do think of physics experiments as real-world problems, but some of our customers are doing really neat stuff that's much closer to a lay-perspective of what "real-world" means. For example, Groovenauts and Mitsubishi Estate collaborated [4] to optimize the routing of waste-collection trucks. Another one, a collaboration [5] with Menten AI, involving protein design (admittedly, a bit over my head) made use of our hybrid sampling service and they're now doing wet-lab experiments. We've collected [6] quite a few of these applications, and I'm barely familiar with a few of them.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-08-d-wave-large-scale-quantum-sim...

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.01019

[3] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6398/162

[4] https://www.dwavesys.com/sites/default/files/Dwave_Groovenau...

[5] https://www.dwavesys.com/sites/default/files/Dwave_Menten%20...

[6] https://www.dwavesys.com/applications