COLLEGE PARK, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Researchers from The University of Maryland and IonQ, Inc. (IonQ) (NYSE: IONQ), a leader in trapped-ion quantum computing, on Monday published results in the journal Nature that show a significant breakthrough in error correction technology for quantum computers. In collaboration with scientists from Duke University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, this work demonstrates for the first time how quantum computers can overcome quantum computing errors, a key technical obstacle to large-scale use cases like financial market prediction or drug discovery.

Quantum computers suffer from errors when qubits encounter environmental interference. Quantum error correction works by combining multiple qubits together to form a logical qubit that more securely stores quantum information. But storing information by itself is not enough; quantum algorithms also need to access and manipulate the information. To interact with information in a logical qubit without creating more errors, the logical qubit needs to be fault-tolerant.

The study, completed at the University of Maryland, peer-reviewed, and published in the journal Nature, demonstrates how trapped ion systems like IonQs can soon deploy fault-tolerant logical qubits to overcome the problem of error correction at scale. By successfully creating the first fault-tolerant logical qubit a qubit that is resilient to a failure in any one component the team has laid the foundation for quantum computers that are both reliable and large enough for practical uses such as risk modeling or shipping route optimization. The team demonstrated that this could be achieved with minimal overhead, requiring only nine physical qubits to encode one logical qubit. This will allow IonQ to apply error correction only when needed, in the amount needed, while minimizing qubit cost.

This is about significantly reducing the overhead in computational power that is typically required for error correction in quantum computers," said Peter Chapman, President and CEO of IonQ. "If a computer spends all its time and power correcting errors, that's not a useful computer. What this paper shows is how the trapped ion approach used in IonQ systems can leapfrog others to fault tolerance by taking small, unreliable parts and turning them into a very reliable device. Competitors are likely to need orders of magnitude more qubits to achieve similar error correction results.

Behind todays study are recently graduated UMD PhD students and current IonQ quantum engineers, Laird Egan and Daiwei Zhu, IonQ cofounder Chris Monroe as well as IonQ technical advisor and Duke Professor Ken Brown. Coauthors of the paper include: UMD and Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) research scientist Marko Cetina; postdoctoral researcher Crystal Noel; graduate students Andrew Risinger and Debopriyo Biswas; Duke University graduate student Dripto M. Debroy and postdoctoral researcher Michael Newman; and Georgia Institute of Technology graduate student Muyuan Li.

The news follows on the heels of other significant technological developments from IonQ. The company recently demonstrated the industrys first Reconfigurable Multicore Quantum Architecture (RMQA) technology, which can dynamically configure 4 chains of 16 ions into quantum computing cores. The company also recently debuted patent-pending evaporated glass traps: technology that lays the foundation for continual improvements to IonQs hardware and supports a significant increase in the number of ions that can be trapped in IonQs quantum computers. Furthermore, it recently became the first quantum computer company whose systems are available for use via all major cloud providers. Last week, IonQ also became the first publicly-traded, pure-play quantum computing company.

About IonQ

IonQ, Inc. is a leader in quantum computing, with a proven track record of innovation and deployment. IonQs next-generation quantum computer is the worlds most powerful trapped-ion quantum computer, and IonQ has defined what it believes is the best path forward to scale. IonQ is the only company with its quantum systems available through the cloud on Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as through direct API access. IonQ was founded in 2015 by Christopher Monroe and Jungsang Kim based on 25 years of pioneering research. To learn more, visit http://www.ionq.com.

About the University of Maryland

The University of Maryland, College Park is the state's flagship university and one of the nation's preeminent public research universities. A global leader in research, entrepreneurship and innovation, the university is home to more than 40,000 students,10,000 faculty and staff, and 297 academic programs. As one of the nations top producers of Fulbright scholars, its faculty includes two Nobel laureates, three Pulitzer Prize winners and 58 members of the national academies. The institution has a $2.2 billion operating budget and secures more than $1 billion annually in research funding together with the University of Maryland, Baltimore. For more information about the University of Maryland, College Park, visit http://www.umd.edu.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Some of the forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking words. Statements that are not historical in nature, including the words anticipate, expect, suggests, plan, believe, intend, estimates, targets, projects, should, could, would, may, will, forecast and other similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements include those related to the Companys ability to further develop and advance its quantum computers and achieve scale; and the ability of competitors to achieve similar error correction results. Forward-looking statements are predictions, projections and other statements about future events that are based on current expectations and assumptions and, as a result, are subject to risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this press release, including but not limited to: market adoption of quantum computing solutions and the Companys products, services and solutions; the ability of the Company to protect its intellectual property; changes in the competitive industries in which the Company operates; changes in laws and regulations affecting the Companys business; the Companys ability to implement its business plans, forecasts and other expectations, and identify and realize additional partnerships and opportunities; and the risk of downturns in the market and the technology industry including, but not limited to, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. You should carefully consider the foregoing factors and the other risks and uncertainties described in the Risk Factors section of the registration statement on Form S-4 and other documents filed by the Company from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings identify and address other important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and the Company assumes no obligation and do not intend to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. The Company does not give any assurance that it will achieve its expectations.

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IonQ and University of Maryland Researchers Demonstrate Fault-Tolerant Error Correction, Critical for Unlocking the Full Potential of Quantum...

In the thick of action, Cisco has revealed the technology trends that are expected to make a significant impact in 2022 and beyond.

Commenting on the trends and predictions, Osama Al-Zoubi, CTO, Cisco Middle East and Africa, said: Technology is always evolving and moving in exciting new directions. In a time of fast-paced digitization, we identified a range of trends and innovations our customers can expect to see over the next years.

Prediction: Ethical, responsible, and explainable AI will become a top priority

The extreme quantity of data being generated has already exceeded human scale but still needs to be processed intelligently and, in some cases, in near real-time. This scenario is where machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) will come into their own.

The challenge is that data has ownership, sovereignty, privacy, and compliance issues associated with it. And if the AI being used to produce instant insights has inherent biases built-in, then these insights are inherently flawed.

This leads to the need for ethical, responsible, and explainable AI. The AI needs to be transparent, so everyone using the system understands how the insights have been produced. Transparency must be present in all aspects of the AI lifecycle its design, development, and deployment.

Prediction: Data driving Edge towards whole new application development

Modern enterprises are defined by the business applications they create, connect to and use. In effect, applications, whether they are servicing end-users or are business-to-business focused or even machine-to-machine connections, will become the boundary of the enterprise.

The business interactions that happen across different types of applications will create an ever-expanding deluge of data. Every aspect of every interaction will generate additional data to provide predictive insights. With predictive insights, the data will likely gravitate to a central data store for some use cases. However, other use cases will require pre-processing of some data at the Edge, including machine learning and other capabilities.

Prediction: Future of innovation and business is tied to unlocking the power of data

Beyond enabling contextual business insights to be generated from the data, teams will be able to better automate many complex actions, ultimately getting to automated self-healing. To achieve this future state, applications must be created with an automated, observable, and API (Application Programming Interface)-first mindset with seamless security embedded from development to run-time. Organisations will have the ability to identify, inspect, and manage APIs regardless of provider or source.

Prediction: Always-on, ubiquitous and cheap internet key to future tech and social equality

There is no doubt that the trend for untethered connectivity and communications will continue. The sheer convenience of using devices wirelessly is obvious to everyone, whether nomadic or mobile.

This always-on internet connectivity will further help alleviate social and economic disparity through more equitable access to the modern economy, especially in non-metropolitan areas, helping create jobs for everyone. But this also means that if wireless connectivity is lost or interrupted, activities must not come to a grinding halt.

The future needs ubiquitous, reliable, always-on internet connectivity at low price points. A future that includes seamless internet services requires the heterogeneity of access meaning AI-augmented and seamless connectivity between every cellular and Wi-Fi generation and the upcoming LEO satellite constellations and beyond.

Prediction: Quantum networking will power a faster, more secure future

Quantum computing and security will interconnect very differently than classical communications networks, which stream bits and bytes to provide voice and data information.

Quantum technology is fundamentally based on an unexplained phenomenon in quantum physics the entanglement between particles that enables them to share states. In the case of quantum networking, this phenomenon can be used to share or transmit information. The prospect of joining sets of smaller quantum computers together to make a very large quantum computer is enticing.

Quantum networking could enable a new type of secure connection between digital devices, making them impenetrable to hacks. As this type of fool proof security becomes achievable with quantum networking, it could lead to better fraud protection for transactions. In addition, this higher quality of secure connectivity may also be able to protect voice and data communications from any interference or snooping. All of these possibilities would re-shape the internet we know and use today.

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From ethical AI to quantum networking Cisco predicts the future of technology - ITP.net

While researchers don't understand everything about the quantum world, what they do know is that quantum particles hold immense potential, in particular to hold and process large amounts of information.

Quantum computing exploits the puzzling behavior that scientists have been observing for decades in nature's smallest particles think atoms, photons or electrons. At this scale, the classical laws of physics ceases to apply, and instead we shift to quantum rules.

While researchers don't understand everything about the quantum world, what they do know is that quantum particles hold immense potential, in particular to hold and process large amounts of information. Successfully bringing those particles under control in a quantum computer could trigger an explosion of compute power that would phenomenally advance innovation in many fields that require complex calculations, like drug discovery, climate modelling, financial optimization or logistics.

As Bob Sutor, chief quantum exponent at IBM, puts it: "Quantum computing is our way of emulating nature to solve extraordinarily difficult problems and make them tractable," he tells ZDNet.

Quantum computers come in various shapes and forms, but they are all built on the same principle: they host a quantum processor where quantum particles can be isolated for engineers to manipulate.

The nature of those quantum particles, as well as the method employed to control them, varies from one quantum computing approach to another. Some methods require the processor to be cooled down to freezing temperatures, others to play with quantum particles using lasers but share the goal of finding out how to best exploit the value of quantum physics.

The systems we have been using since the 1940s in various shapes and forms laptops, smartphones, cloud servers, supercomputers are known as classical computers. Those are based on bits, a unit of information that powers every computation that happens in the device.

In a classical computer, each bit can take on either a value of one or zero to represent and transmit the information that is used to carry out computations. Using bits, developers can write programs, which are sets of instructions that are read and executed by the computer.

Classical computers have been indispensable tools in the past few decades, but the inflexibility of bits is limiting. As an analogy, if tasked with looking for a needle in a haystack, a classical computer would have to be programmed to look through every single piece of hay straw until it reached the needle.

There are still many large problems, therefore, that classical devices can't solve. "There are calculations that could be done on a classical system, but they might take millions of years or use more computer memory that exists in total on Earth," says Sutor. "These problems are intractable today."

At the heart of any quantum computer are qubits, also known as quantum bits, and which can loosely be compared to the bits that process information in classical computers.

Qubits, however, have very different properties to bits, because they are made of the quantum particles found in nature those same particles that have been obsessing scientists for many years.

One of the properties of quantum particles that is most useful for quantum computing is known as superposition, which allows quantum particles to exist in several states at the same time. The best way to imagine superposition is to compare it to tossing a coin: instead of being heads or tails, quantum particles are the coin while it is still spinning.

By controlling quantum particles, researchers can load them with data to create qubits and thanks to superposition, a single qubit doesn't have to be either a one or a zero, but can be both at the same time. In other words, while a classical bit can only be heads or tails, a qubit can be, at once, heads and tails.

This means that, when asked to solve a problem, a quantum computer can use qubits to run several calculations at once to find an answer, exploring many different avenues in parallel.

So in the needle-in-a-haystack scenario about, unlike a classical machine, a quantum computer could in principle browse through all hay straws at the same time, finding the needle in a matter of seconds rather than looking for years even centuries before it found what it was searching for.

What's more: qubits can be physically linked together thanks to another quantum property called entanglement, meaning that with every qubit that is added to a system, the device's capabilities increase exponentially where adding more bits only generates linear improvement.

Every time we use another qubit in a quantum computer, we double the amount of information and processing ability available for solving problems. So by the time we get to 275 qubits, we can compute with more pieces of information than there are atoms in the observable universe. And the compression of computing time that this could generate could have big implications in many use cases.

Quantum computers are all built on the same principle: they host a quantum processor where quantum particles can be isolated for engineers to manipulate.

"There are a number of cases where time is money. Being able to do things more quickly will have a material impact in business," Scott Buchholz, managing director at Deloitte Consulting, tells ZDNet.

The gains in time that researchers are anticipating as a result of quantum computing are not of the order of hours or even days. We're rather talking about potentially being capable of calculating, in just a few minutes, the answer to problems that today's most powerful supercomputers couldn't resolve in thousands of years, ranging from modelling hurricanes all the way to cracking the cryptography keys protecting the most sensitive government secrets.

And businesses have a lot to gain, too. According to recent research by Boston Consulting Group (BCG),the advances that quantum computing will enable could create value of up to $850 billion in the next 15 to 30 years, $5 to $10 billion of which will be generated in the next five years if key vendors deliver on the technology as they have promised.

Programmers write problems in the form of algorithms for classical computers to resolve and similarly, quantum computers will carry out calculations based on quantum algorithms. Researchers have already identified that some quantum algorithms would be particularly suited to the enhanced capabilities of quantum computers.

For example, quantum systems could tackle optimization algorithms, which help identify the best solution among many feasible options, and could be applied in a wide range of scenarios ranging from supply chain administration to traffic management. ExxonMobil and IBM, for instance, are working together to find quantum algorithmsthat could one day manage the 50,000 merchant ships crossing the oceans each day to deliver goods, to reduce the distance and time traveled by fleets.

Quantum simulation algorithms are also expected to deliver unprecedented results, as qubits enable researchers to handle the simulation and prediction of complex interactions between molecules in larger systems, which could lead to faster breakthroughs in fields like materials science and drug discovery.

With quantum computers capable of handling and processing much larger datasets,AI and machine-learning applications are set to benefit hugely, with faster training times and more capable algorithms. And researchers have also demonstrated that quantum algorithmshave the potential to crack traditional cryptography keys, which for now are too mathematically difficult for classical computers to break.

To create qubits, which are the building blocks of quantum computers, scientists have to find and manipulate the smallest particles of nature tiny parts of the universe that can be found thanks to different mediums. This is why there are currently many types of quantum processors being developed by a range of companies.

One of the most advanced approaches consists of using superconducting qubits, which are made of electrons, and come in the form of the familiar chandelier-like quantum computers. Both IBM and Google have developed superconducting processors.

Another approach that is gaining momentum is trapped ions, which Honeywell and IonQ are leading the way on, and in which qubits are housed in arrays of ions that are trapped in electric fields and then controlled with lasers.

Major companies like Xanadu and PsiQuantum, for their part, are investing in yet another method that relies on quantum particles of light, called photons, to encode data and create qubits. Qubits can also be created out of silicon spin qubits which Intel is focusing on but also cold atoms or even diamonds.

Quantum annealing, an approach that was chosen by D-Wave, is a different category of computing altogether. It doesn't rely on the same paradigm as other quantum processors, known as the gate model. Quantum annealing processors are much easier to control and operate, which is why D-Wave has already developed devices that can manipulate thousands of qubits, where virtually every other quantum hardware company is working with about 100 qubits or less. On the other hand, the annealing approach is only suitable for a specific set of optimization problems, which limits its capabilities.

Both IBM and Google have developed superconducting processors.

Right now, with a mere 100 qubits being the state of the art, there is very little that can actually be done with quantum computers. For qubits to start carrying out meaningful calculations, they will have to be counted in the thousands, and even millions.

"While there is a tremendous amount of promise and excitement about what quantum computers can do one day, I think what they can do today is relatively underwhelming," says Buchholz.

Increasing the qubit count in gate-model processors, however, is incredibly challenging. This is because keeping the particles that make up qubits in their quantum state is difficult a little bit like trying to keep a coin spinning without falling on one side or the other, except much harder.

Keeping qubits spinning requires isolating them from any environmental disturbance that might cause them to lose their quantum state. Google and IBM, for example, do this by placing their superconducting processors in temperatures that are colder than outer space, which in turn require sophisticated cryogenic technologies that are currently near-impossible to scale up.

In addition, the instability of qubits means that they are unreliable, and still likely to cause computation errors. This hasgiven rise to a branch of quantum computing dedicated to developing error-correction methods.

Although research is advancing at pace, therefore, quantum computers are for now stuck in what is known as the NISQ era: noisy, intermediate-scale quantum computing but the end-goal is to build a fault-tolerant, universal quantum computer.

As Buchholz explains, it is hard to tell when this is likely to happen. "I would guess we are a handful of years from production use cases, but the real challenge is that this is a little like trying to predict research breakthroughs," he says. "It's hard to put a timeline on genius."

In 2019, Googleclaimed that its 54-qubit superconducting processor called Sycamore had achieved quantum supremacy the point at which a quantum computer can solve a computational task that is impossible to run on a classical device in any realistic amount of time.

Google said that Sycamore has calculated, in only 200 seconds, the answer to a problem that would have taken the world's biggest supercomputers 10,000 years to complete.

More recently,researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China claimed a similar breakthrough, saying that their quantum processor had taken 200 seconds to achieve a task that would have taken 600 million years to complete with classical devices.

This is far from saying that either of those quantum computers are now capable of outstripping any classical computer at any task. In both cases, the devices were programmed to run very specific problems, with little usefulness aside from proving that they could compute the task significantly faster than classical systems.

Without a higher qubit count and better error correction, proving quantum supremacy for useful problems is still some way off.

Organizations that are investing in quantum resources see this as the preparation stage: their scientists are doing the groundwork to be ready for the day that a universal and fault-tolerant quantum computer is ready.

In practice, this means that they are trying to discover the quantum algorithms that are most likely to show an advantage over classical algorithms once they can be run on large-scale quantum systems. To do so, researchers typically try to prove that quantum algorithms perform comparably to classical ones on very small use cases, and theorize that as quantum hardware improves, and the size of the problem can be grown, the quantum approach will inevitably show some significant speed-ups.

For example, scientists at Japanese steel manufacturer Nippon Steelrecently came up with a quantum optimization algorithm that could compete against its classical counterpartfor a small problem that was run on a 10-qubit quantum computer. In principle, this means that the same algorithm equipped with thousands or millions of error-corrected qubits could eventually optimize the company's entire supply chain, complete with the management of dozens of raw materials, processes and tight deadlines, generating huge cost savings.

The work that quantum scientists are carrying out for businesses is, therefore, highly experimental, and so far there are fewer than 100 quantum algorithms that have been shown to compete against their classical equivalents which only points to how emergent the field still is.

With most use cases requiring a fully error-corrected quantum computer, just who will deliver one first is the question on everyone's lips in the quantum industry, and it is impossible to know the exact answer.

All quantum hardware companies are keen to stress that their approach will be the first one to crack the quantum revolution, making it even harder to discern noise from reality. "The challenge at the moment is that it's like looking at a group of toddlers in a playground and trying to figure out which one of them is going to win the Nobel Prize," says Buchholz.

"I have seen the smartest people in the field say they're not really sure which one of these is the right answer. There are more than half a dozen different competing technologies and it's still not clear which one will wind up being the best, or if there will be a best one," he continues.

In general, experts agree that the technology will not reach its full potential until after 2030. The next five years, however, may start bringing some early use cases as error correction improves and qubit counts start reaching numbers that allow for small problems to be programmed.

IBM is one of the rare companies thathas committed to a specific quantum roadmap, which defines the ultimate objective of realizing a million-qubit quantum computer. In the nearer term, Big Blue anticipates that it will release a 1,121-qubit system in 2023, which might mark the start of the first experimentations with real-world use cases.

In general, experts agree that quantum computers will not reach their full potential until after 2030.

Developing quantum hardware is a huge part of the challenge, and arguably the most significant bottleneck in the ecosystem. But even a universal fault-tolerant quantum computer would be of little use without the matching quantum software.

"Of course, none of these online facilities are much use without knowing how to 'speak' quantum," Andrew Fearnside, senior associate specializing in quantum technologies at intellectual property firm Mewburn Ellis, tells ZDNet.

Creating quantum algorithms is not as easy as taking a classical algorithm and adapting it to the quantum world. Quantum computing, rather, requires a brand-new programming paradigm that can only be run on a brand-new software stack.

Of course, some hardware providers also develop software tools, the most established of which is IBM's open-source quantum software development kit Qiskit. But on top of that, the quantum ecosystem is expanding to include companies dedicated exclusively to creating quantum software. Familiar names include Zapata, QC Ware or 1QBit, which all specialize in providing businesses with the tools to understand the language of quantum.

And increasingly, promising partnerships are forming to bring together different parts of the ecosystem. For example, therecent alliance between Honeywell, which is building trapped ions quantum computers, and quantum software company Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC), has got analysts predicting that a new player could be taking a lead in the quantum race.

The complexity of building a quantum computer think ultra-high vacuum chambers, cryogenic control systems and other exotic quantum instruments means that the vast majority of quantum systems are currently firmly sitting in lab environments, rather than being sent out to customers' data centers.

To let users access the devices to start running their experiments, therefore, quantum companies have launched commercial quantum computing cloud services, making the technology accessible to a wider range of customers.

The four largest providers of public cloud computing services currently offer access to quantum computers on their platform. IBM and Google have both put their own quantum processors on the cloud, whileMicrosoft's Azure QuantumandAWS's Braketservice let customers access computers from third-party quantum hardware providers.

The jury remains out on which technology will win the race, if any at all, but one thing is for certain: the quantum computing industry is developing fast, and investors are generously funding the ecosystem. Equity investments in quantum computing nearly tripled in 2020, and according to BCG, they are set to rise even more in 2021 to reach $800 million.

Government investment is even more significant: the US has unlocked $1.2 billion for quantum information science over the next five years, while the EU announced a 1 billion ($1.20 billion) quantum flagship. The UKalso recently reached the 1 billion ($1.37 billion) budget milestonefor quantum technologies, and while official numbers are not known in China,the government has made no secret of its desire to aggressively compete in the quantum race.

This has caused the quantum ecosystem to flourish over the past years, with new startups increasing from a handful in 2013 to nearly 200 in 2020. The appeal of quantum computing is also increasing among potential customers: according to analysis firm Gartner,while only 1% of companies were budgeting for quantum in 2018, 20% are expected to do so by 2023.

Although not all businesses need to be preparing themselves to keep up with quantum-ready competitors, there are some industries where quantum algorithms are expected to generate huge value, and where leading companies are already getting ready.

Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are two examples of financial behemoths investing in quantum computing. That's because in banking,quantum optimization algorithms could give a boost to portfolio optimization, by better picking which stocks to buy and sell for maximum return.

In pharmaceuticals, where the drug discovery process is on average a $2 billion, 10-year-long deal that largely relies on trial and error, quantum simulation algorithms are also expected to make waves. This is also the case in materials science: companies like OTI Lumionics, for example,are exploring the use of quantum computers to design more efficient OLED displays.

Leading automotive companies including Volkswagen and BMW are also keeping a close eye on the technology, which could impact the sector in various ways, ranging from designing more efficient batteries to optimizing the supply chain, through to better management of traffic and mobility. Volkswagen, for example,pioneered the use of a quantum algorithm that optimized bus routes in real time by dodging traffic bottlenecks.

As the technology matures, however, it is unlikely that quantum computing will be limited to a select few. Rather, analysts anticipate that virtually all industries have the potential to benefit from the computational speedup that qubits will unlock.

There are some industries where quantum algorithms are expected to generate huge value, and where leading companies are already getting ready.

Quantum computers are expected to be phenomenal at solving a certain class of problems, but that doesn't mean that they will be a better tool than classical computers for every single application. Particularly, quantum systems aren't a good fit for fundamental computations like arithmetic, or for executing commands.

"Quantum computers are great constraint optimizers, but that's not what you need to run Microsoft Excel or Office," says Buchholz. "That's what classical technology is for: for doing lots of maths, calculations and sequential operations."

In other words, there will always be a place for the way that we compute today. It is unlikely, for example, that you will be streaming a Netflix series on a quantum computer anytime soon. Rather, the two technologies will be used in conjunction, with quantum computers being called for only where they can dramatically accelerate a specific calculation.

Buchholz predicts that, as classical and quantum computing start working alongside each other, access will look like a configuration option. Data scientists currently have a choice of using CPUs or GPUs when running their workloads, and it might be that quantum processing units (QPUs) join the list at some point. It will be up to researchers to decide which configuration to choose, based on the nature of their computation.

Although the precise way that users will access quantum computing in the future remains to be defined, one thing is certain: they are unlikely to be required to understand the fundamental laws of quantum computing in order to use the technology.

"People get confused because the way we lead into quantum computing is by talking about technical details," says Buchholz. "But you don't need to understand how your cellphone works to use it.

"People sometimes forget that when you log into a server somewhere, you have no idea what physical location the server is in or even if it exists physically at all anymore. The important question really becomes what it is going to look like to access it."

And as fascinating as qubits, superposition, entanglement and other quantum phenomena might be, for most of us this will come as welcome news.

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What is quantum computing? Everything you need to know about the strange world of quantum computers - ZDNet

University of Maryland President Darryll J. Pines today announced the creation of the Discovery Fund, which will support innovative companies and startups based in College Park and throughout Prince Georges County with up to $1 million a year from the university.

The first round of support is earmarked to help build a network of quantum business focused around UMD, Pines said in an address at the universitys inaugural Quantum Investment Summit. The two-day event was designed to connect investors and innovators in the growing quantum business and technology space, and drew more than 300 in-person and virtual participants from U.S. and international companies and organizations.

The university has long been a powerhouse in quantum physics research as well as a leader in designing and engineering technology based on this revolutionary branch of scienceone expected to result in quantum computers with unprecedented capabilities as well as disruptive advances in material science, digital security, health care and other fields.

UMDs growing commitment to strengthening the industrys foundation further solidifies the universitys status as the heart of the Capital of Quantum, Pines said.

This continual building on the infrastructure needed to catalyze startups and create groundbreaking products is absolutely essential if were to support and accelerate the advancement and commercialization of quantum technologies, he said. The Discovery Fund is the perfect addition to keep the momentum going around the quantum ecosystem we have been building for more than three decades.

The announcement of the new funding comes the same month that a leading quantum computing company, IonQ, went public on the New York Stock exchange with a $2 billion market valuation. The company is based in part on technology developed in UMD labs, and illustrates what the university has to gain: As IonQ works to bring quantum computing to scale, its continued close connection with UMD affords the company access to a pipeline of stellar workforce talent, Pines said today.

Another feature in UMDs expanding ecosystem is the Quantum Startup Foundry (QSF), backed by a $10 million capital investment from UMD, which will function as a business incubator to support nascent firms in the quantum technology field. The university today announced that MITRE, a not-for-profit company that works in the public interest and operates six federally funded research and development centers in areas including aviation, defense, health care, homeland security, and cybersecurity had joined as a founding QSF member.

Julie Lenzer, UMDs chief innovation officer, said offerings like the QSF and the Quantum Investment Summit help make the university central to quantum-based industry as it already is in quantum science and engineering research.

Helping to give rise to a company as successful as IonQ would be a once-in-a-lifetime thing for most schools, if that, Lenzer said. But were continuing to build on this so we can breed more success by connecting innovative quantum research and ideas with investors who want to make a difference in an area thats going to define the future.

Attendees at the investment summit included businesses ranging from giants like Lockheed Martin and IBM to new firms vying to become household names, as well as local and state officials, investors and venture capital firms.

With federal and state agencies and nations worldwide pouring many billions of dollars into quantum researchand hoping to reap the rewards of winning the race to deploy the technologyUMD, the region and the nation must strive to turn deep fundamental understanding of the science into innovation, Pines said.

Make no mistake: This is our generations space race, he said. Who will be the first to unleash the power of quantum? Im hoping its going to be us.

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Discovery Fund to Seed Local Innovation Ecosystem - Maryland Today

Dell Technologies have presented what they think about the year 2021 in terms of technologies and the companys view and strategy towards said elements.

For the main discussions, they have shared their insights, analytics, and predictions for the top 4 emerging technologies of 2021, namely quantum computing, silicon chips, 5G, multi-cloud edge solutions.

For starters, the company recognizes the existence and ability of quantum computing but it is not yet practical at least for a couple of years and it should be positioned as an augmentation of conventional computing such as an addition of a new tier towards the highest point of a pyramid hierarchy. They are also impressed by the fact that the cryptography sector has finally met its real challenger in terms of pure brute force speed and have started investing R&D resources to refine modern-day security solutions to match them. Recommendation wise, they are encouraging the development of a simulator and language tailored specifically for quantum computing to train and produce sufficient experts in the future.

Onto semiconductors, they have seen global leaders such as Apple, Intel, and AMD all made their own moves of incorporating their own heterogeneous architectures such as big.LITTLE in their processors one way or another and with NVIDIA purchasing ARM and AMD getting its hands on Xylinx, Dell Technologies are pretty sure future servers are going to follow suit and similar architectures as well, focusing on software modernization, integration platform in conjunction with the silicon chip itself.

The enterprise use of 5G also stemmed the organizations interest as they have predicted that the new standards will really take off during this year as true SA-5G specifications such as mMTC, UR-LLC and MEC provide the groundwork for telecommunications parties to learn, adapt and deploy them in both public and private use cases. Software solutions providers such as Dell Technologies themselves, Microsoft, and more will chime in to continuously refine 5G to be open yet standardized.

Finally, multi-cloud assimilation will solve the issue of edge proliferation which is the excessive independent edge system that currently existed in the ecosystem by clearly classifying resource pools and workload extensions into 2 unique individual categories. In a simpler sense, more workloads and resources targeting public clouds and SaaS edges will involve more logical partitioning compared to the past.

Amit Midha, President of the APAC and Japan region, also added that the entire world is slowly shifting its focus to Asia in terms of business and the technology it carries along and forward into the future. Discussing the companys progress for the social impact aimed for the year 2030 with 9 years to go, they are in the driver seat to achieve a 1:1 ratio of using recycled materials for manufacturing and gender representation for its employees alongside affecting more than 1 billion of lives for a greater good.

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Find out what Dell Technologies has to say about quantum computing, 5G and more for this year - Nasi Lemak Tech

The US Department of Energy (DoE), the most influential body in the way the largest supercomputers are designed and built, has been looking beyond CMOS long before the introduction of exascale systems.

Agencies have made multiple bets that quantum computing will play an important role in the future of large-scale scientific computing, whether as an accelerator of some sort or as a more general-purpose system of the future. There is. With so many projects scattered around, its difficult to maintain current totals, but at current rates, DoE will invest well over $ 1 billion in future quantum technology by the end of 2022. Its possible, and its not unreasonable to think that this doesnt include millions of dollars. Reserved to build the quantum internet.

That gambling dollar figure continues to grow with an additional $ 73 million added today.

DoE has been strong in funding quantum computing for the past few years. Over the course of five years, it has pushed $ 115 million into this area from comprehensive programs like Q-Next, splitting its funding into the quantum application and domain areas (widely referred to by DoE as Quantum Information Science or QIS). increase). The system, even if the realization of that funding could be 10 years (or more) ahead and still might not replace traditional supercomputers.

In 2019, DoE awarded more than $ 60 million for quantum computing in communications, and in January 2020 announced $ 625 million for the new quantum computing center. $ 30 million for QIS in key application areas in March of this year. It will be added to the $ 115 million Q-Next program at Argonne National Laboratory. All of this does not include DoE funding that works with NSF and other institutions and programs, in addition to the $ 73 million announced today. So perhaps its already over a billion.

This week, DoE funds new thinking and experimental and theoretical efforts to promote understanding of the quantum phenomena of systems that can be used in Quantum Information Science (QIS) and the use of quantum computing in chemistry and materials science research. Announced $ 73 million to offer .. This influx of investment 29 projects Above all, more than 3 years to new materials, cryogenic systems and algorithms.

Very few winners have focused on the application, and the majority of the funding seems to support the quantum hardware effort. This includes projects focused on creating qubits (materials, enhanced stability, all-new qubit types), fault tolerance, and error correction. Some efforts focus on quantum simulation in traditional systems.

The award spans various universities and national laboratories. The Berkeley National Lab has two awards, one group focusing on the superconducting structure of scalable quantum systems, and the other team developing f-element qubits with controllable coherence and entanglement. I am. Argonne National Laboratory also has two groups, one focusing on entanglement issues and the other focusing on quantum spin coherence of photosynthetic proteins.

Other notable programs funded include work on applications such as quantum chemistry (Emory University) and molecular dynamics / materials science (University of Southern California). There are also some award-winning teams that focus on specific programming-related challenges.

The project was selected based on a peer review under the DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement Materials and Chemical Science Research for Quantum Information Science by the Department of Basic Energy Sciences (BES) of DOE. NS DOE Science Bureaus efforts in QIS It is notified by community input and applications focused on target missions such as quantum computing, quantum simulation, quantum communication, and quantum sensing. DOEs Science Department supports 5 National QIS Research Center A diverse portfolio of research projects, including recent awards for promoting QIS in areas related to nuclear physics and fusion energy science.

Quantum science represents the next technological revolution and frontier in the information age, and the United States is at the forefront, said Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm. National Labs will strengthen resilience in the face of increasing cyber threats and climate disasters, paving the way for a cleaner and safer future.

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U.S. DoE sends another $ 73 million into the future of Quantum

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U.S. DoE sends another $ 73 million into the future of Quantum - Illinoisnewstoday.com

If 2020 had you wishing you could say Beam me up, Scotty, youre not alone. You may be one tiny step closer to getting your wish in a few decades or so.

Scientists from Fermilab, Caltech, NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Calgary achieved long-distance quantum teleportation in mid-2020, they confirmed in an academic journal article published last month. Its another step toward realizing whats often called quantum computing, and also toward understanding physics on a different level than we do now, perhaps well enough to someday teleport humans. And while there is no ETF specifically for that yet, here are some broad guidelines for thinking about how to invest in very nascent technologies.

For starters, its good to understand the broad contours of the industry supporting the idea. A 2020 market research analysis estimates the quantum computing market will top $65 billion per year by 2030, while a 2019 BCG report makes the case for investing now, rather than waiting for things to take off. As MarketWatch reported in late 2019, quantum computing is expected to remake everything from pharmaceuticals to cybersecurity.

Right now, there are several blue-chip biggies involved in the quantum race. Scientists from AT&T were involved in the 2020 experiments, and big companies like Microsoft MSFT, -2.13%, Tencent TCEHY, +1.34%, and IBM IBM, -1.54% all have initiatives.

Its easy enough to find exchange-traded funds with big holdings of those giants likely easier than finding publicly-traded small companies on the bleeding edge of these technologies but its also important to remember how small a share of their revenues experimental ventures like these are.

There are still some good models for funds constructed around developing industries like this one, noted Todd Rosenbluth, head of mutual fund and ETF research at CFRA. One is the Procure Space ETF UFO, -1.49%, which sports the ticker UFO. UFO launched before Virgin Galactic SPCE, -2.19% went public, at a moment when it was hard to call it a true pure-play space fund. As MarketWatch noted at the time, UFO is composed of companies involved in existing space-related business lines: ground equipment manufacturing that uses satellite systems, rocket and satellite manufacturing and operation, satellite-based telecommunications and broadcasting, and so on.

The one ETF that might now be said to be closest to offering access to quantum technology takes a similar approach. The Defiance Quantum ETF QTUM, +0.71% has quantum in its name, but says it provides exposure to companies on the forefront of cloud computing, quantum computing, machine learning, and other transformative computing technologies.

Another consideration might be an ETF specializing in very early-stage technology. In December, MarketWatch profiled the Innovator Loup Frontier Technology ETF LOUP, -0.08%. Rosenbluth has also been watching the Direxion Moonshot Innovators ETF MOON, -0.66%.

Disruptive technology themes have gotten a boost from one of biggest success stories of 2020, he said in an interview. ARK Invests fund lineup took in billions of dollars and enjoyed triple-digit gains as their bets on technology had a moment.

The next-gen narrative seems to resonate with investors, and complex themes like these make a good case for investing in actively-managed funds that benefit from researchers expertise. That means that when it succeeds, Theres a snowball effect of investors coming to see the benefits of using ETFs for these kinds of themes, Rosenbluth said.

I think the future is bright for these types of ETFs, Rosenbluth told MarketWatch. Theres less white space in the ETF world than there was before, but its inevitable that there will be a teleportation-related ETF.

Read next: What will 2021 bring for ETFs?

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Quantum computing is so last-decade. Get ready to invest in the final frontier... teleportation - MarketWatch

In 2011, the movie "Contagion" eerily predicted what a future world fighting a deadly pandemic would look like. In 2020, I, along with hundreds of thousands of people around the world, saw this Hollywood prediction play out by being diagnosed with COVID-19. It was a frightening year by any measure, as every person was impacted in unique ways.

Having been involved in the development of the Internet in the 1970s, Ive seen first-hand the impact of technology on peoples lives. We are now seeing another major milestone in our lifetimethe development of a COVID-19 vaccine.

What the"Contagion" didnt show is what happens after a vaccine is developed. Now, as we enter 2021, and with the first doses of a COVID-19 vaccine being administered, a return to normal feels within reach. But what will our return to normal look like really? Here are threepredictions for 2021.

1. Continuous and episodic Internet of Medical Things monitoring devices will prove popular for remote medical diagnosis. The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the practice of clinical medicine at least in the parts of the world where Internet access is widely available and at high enough speeds to support video conferencing. A video consult is often the only choice open to patients short of going to a hospital when outpatient care is insufficient. Video-medicine is unsatisfying in the absence of good clinical data (temperature, blood pressure, pulse for example). The consequence is that health monitoring and measurement devices are increasingly valued to support remote medical diagnosis.

My Prediction: While the COVID-19 pandemic persists into 2021, demand for remote monitoring and measurement will increase. In the long run, this will lead to periodic and continuous monitoring and alerting for a wide range of chronic medical conditions. Remote medicine and early warning health prediction will in turn help citizens save on health care costs and improve and further extend life expectancy.

2. Cities will (finally) adopt self-driving cars. Self-driving cars are anything but new, having emerged from a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Grand Challenge in 2004. Sixteen years later, many companies are competing to make this a reality but skeptics around this technology remain.

My Prediction: In the COVID-19 aftermath, I predict driverless car service will grow in 2021 as people will opt for rides that minimize exposure to drivers and self-clean after every passenger. More cities and states will embrace driverless technology to accommodate changing transportation and public transportation preferences.

3. A practical quantum computation will be demonstrated. In 2019, Google reported that it had demonstrated an important quantum supremacy milestone by showing a computation in minutes that would have taken a conventional computer thousands of years to complete. The computation, however, did not solve any particular practical problem.

My Prediction: In the intervening period, progress has been made and it seems likely that by 2021, we will see some serious application of quantum computing to solve one or more optimization problems in mechanical design, logistics scheduling or resource allocation that would be impractical with conventional supercomputing.

Despite the challenges 2020 presented, it also unlocked some opportunities like leapfrogging with tech adoption. My hope is that the public sector sustains the speed for innovation and development to unlock even greater advancements in the year ahead.

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google. Cerf has held positions at MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, Stanford University, UCLA and IBM. Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and was founding president of the Internet Society. He served on the U.S. National Science Board from 2013-2018.

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The Year Ahead: 3 Predictions From the 'Father of the Internet' Vint Cerf - Nextgov

Scientists at the Freie Universitt Berlin have come up with an AI-based solution for calculating the ground state of the Schrdinger equation in quantum chemistry.

The Schrdingers equation is primarily used to predict the chemical and physical properties of a molecule based on the arrangement of its atoms. The equation helps determine where the electrons and nuclei of a molecule are and under a given set of conditions what their energies are.

The equation has the same central importance as Newtons law motion, which can predict an objects position at a particular moment, but in quantum mechanics that is in atoms or subatomic particles.

The article describes how the neural network developed by the scientists at the Freie Universitt Berlin brings more accuracy in solving the Schrdingers equation and what does this mean for the future.

In principle, the Schrdingers equation can be solved to predict the exact location of atoms or subatomic particles in a molecule, but in practice, this is extremely difficult since it involves a lot of approximation.

Central to the equation is a mathematical object, a wave function that specifies electrons behaviour in a molecule. But the high dimensionality of the wave function makes it extremely difficult to find out how electrons affect each other. Thus the most you get from the mathematical representations is a probabilistic account of it and not exact answers.

This limits the accuracy with which we can find properties of a molecule like the configuration, conformation, size, and shape, which can help define the wave function. The process becomes so complex that it becomes impossible to implement the equation beyond a few atoms.

Replacing the mathematical building blocks, the scientists at Freie Universitt Berlin came up with a deep neural network that is capable of learning the complex patterns of how electrons are located around the nuclei.

The scientists developed a Deep Neural Networks (DNN) model, PauliNet, that has several advantages over conventional methods to study quantum systems like the Quantum Monte Carlo or other classical quantum chemistry methods.

The DNN model developed by these scientists is highly flexible and allows for a variational approach that can aid accurate calculation of electronic properties beyond the electronic energies.

Secondly, it also helps the easy calculation of many-body and more-complex correlation with fewer determinants, reducing the need for higher computation power. The model mainly helped solve a major tradeoff issue between accuracy and computational cost, often faced while solving the Schrodinger equation.

The model can also calculate the local energy of heavy nuclei like heavy metals without using pseudo-potentials or approximations.

Lastly, the model developed in the study has anti-symmetry functions and other principles crucial to electronic wave functions integrated into the DNN model, rather than let the model learn. Thus, building fundamental physics in the model has helped it make meaningful and accurate predictions.

In recent years, artificial intelligence has helped solve many scientific problems that otherwise seemed impossible using traditional methods.

AI has become instrumental in anticipating the results of experiments or simulations of quantum systems, especially due to its sciences complex nature. In 2018, reinforcement learning was used to design new quantum experiments in automated laboratories autonomously.

Recent efforts by the University of Warwick and another IBM and DeepMind have also tried to solve the Schrdingers equation. However, PauliNet, with its greater accuracy of solving the equation now, presents us with a potential to use it in many real-life applications.

Understanding molecules composition can help accelerate drug-discovery, which earlier was difficult due to the approximations to understand its properties.

Similarly, it could also help discover several other elements or metamaterials like new catalysts, industrial chemical applications, new pesticides, among others. It can be used in characterising molecules that are synthesised in laboratories.

Several academic and commercial software use Schrdingers equation at the core but are based on applications. The accuracy of this software will improve. Quantum computing in itself is based on quantum phenomena of superposition and is made up of qubits that take advantage of the principle. Quantum computing performance will improve as qubits will be able to be measured faster.

While the current study has come up with a faster, cheaper, and accurate solution, there are many challenges to overcome before it is industry-ready.

However, once it is ready, the world will witness many applications as a result of greater accuracy in solving Schrdingers equation.

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AI Helps Solve Schrdinger's Equation What Does The Future Hold? - Analytics India Magazine

Some hope that a move to quantum computingqubits instead of bits, analog instead of digitalwill work wonders, including the invention of the true thinking computer. In last weeks podcast, futurist George Gilder and computer engineer Robert J. Marks looked at, among other things, whats really happening with quantum computing:

(The quantum computing discussion begins at 15:04.)

Robert J. Marks: Whats your take on quantum computing? It seems to me that theres been glacial progress in the technology.

George Gilder (pictured): I think quantum computing is rather like AI, in that it moves the actual problem outside the computational process and gives the illusion that it solved the problem, but its really just pushed the problem out. Quantum computing is analog computing, thats what it is. Its changing primitives of the computation to quantum elements, which are presumably the substance of all matter in the universe.

Note: Quantum computing would use actual quantum elements (qubits) to compute instead of digital signals, thus taking advantage of their subatomic speed. But AI theorists have noted, that doesnt get around the halting problem (the computer actually doesnt know what it is doing). That means that a computer still wouldnt replicate human intelligence. That, in turn, is one reason that quantum supremacy can sound a lot like hype.

George Gilder: But still youve got to translate the symbols in the world, which in turn have to be translated from the objects in the world, into these qubits, which are quantum entities. Once youve defined all these connections and structured the data, then the problem is essentially solved by the process of defining it and inputting it into the computer but quantum computing again is a very special purpose machine, extremely special purpose. Because everything has to be exactly structured right for it.

Robert J. Marks: Yeah, thats my point. I think that once we get quantum computing and if it works well, we can also do quantum encryption, which quantum computing cant decode. So thats the next step. So yeah, thats fascinating stuff.

In his new book, Gaming AI (free download here. ), Gilder explains one of the ways quantum computing differs from digital computing:

The qubit is one of the most enigmatic tangles of matter and ghost in the entire armament of physics. Like a binary digit, it can register 0 or 1; what makes it quantum is that it can also register a nonbinary superposition of 0 and 1.

In 1989 I published a book, Microcosm, with the subtitle The Quantum Era in Economics and Technology. Microcosm made the observation that all computers are quantum machines in that they shun the mechanics of relays, cogs, and gears, and manipulate matter from the inside following quantum rules. But they translate all measurements and functions into rigorous binary logicevery bit is 1 or 0. At the time I was writing Microcosm, a few physicists were speculating about a computer that used qubits rather than bits, banishing this translation process and functioning directly in the quantum domain. (P. 39)

The quantum world impinges on computer technology whether we like it or not:

For example, today the key problem in microchips is to avoid spontaneous quantum tunneling, where electrons can find themselves on the other side of a barrier that by the laws of classical physics would have been insurmountable and impenetrable. In digital memory chips or processors, spontaneous tunneling can mean leakage and loss. In a quantum computer, though, such quantum effects may endow a portfolio of features, providing a tool or computational primitive that enables simulation of a world governed by quantum rules. (p. 40)

Quantum rules, while strange, might insure the integrity of a connection because entangled quantum particles respond to each other no matter how far they are separated:

A long-ago thought experiment of Einsteins showed that once any two photonsor other quantum entitiesinteract, they remain in each others influence no matter how far they travel across the universe (as long as they do not interact with something else). Schrdinger christened this entanglement: The spinor other quantum attributeof one behaves as if it reacts to what happens to the other, even when the two are impossibly remote. (p. 40)

So, apart from interaction, no one can change only the data on their side without it being noticed

Underlying all this heady particle physics and quantum computing speculations is actually a philosophical shift. As Gilder puts it in Gaming AI,

John Wheeler provocatively spoke of it from bit and the elementary act of observer-participancy: in short all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.(p. 41)

Which is another way of saying that in reality information, rather than matter and energy, rules our universe.

Also discussed in last weeks podcast (with links to the series and transcripts):

While the West hesitates, China is moving to blockchain. Life After Google by George Gilder, advocating blockchain, became a best seller in China and received a social sciences award. George Gilder, also the author of Gaming AI, explains why Bitcoin might not do as well as blockchain in general, as a future currency source.

You may also enjoy: Will quantum mechanics produce the true thinking computer. Quantum computers come with real world problems of their own.

and

Why AI geniuses havent created true thinking machines. The problems have been hinting at themselves all along.

Next: Whats the future for carbon computing?

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Does Schrdinger's Cat Think Quantum Computing Is a Sure Thing? - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Thanh Nguyen is in the habit of breaking down barriers. Take languages, for instance: Nguyen, a third-year doctoral candidate in nuclear science and engineering (NSE), wanted to connect with other people and cultures for his work and social life, he says, so he learned Vietnamese, French, German, and Russian, and is now taking an MIT course in Mandarin. But this drive to push past obstacles really comes to the fore in his research, where Nguyen is trying to crack the secrets of a new and burgeoning branch of physics.

My dissertation focuses on neutron scattering on topological semimetals, which were only experimentally discovered in 2015, he says. They have very special properties, but because they are so novel, theres a lot thats unknown, and neutrons offer a unique perspective to probe their properties at a new level of clarity.

Topological materials dont fit neatly into conventional categories of substances found in everyday life. They were first materialized in the 1980s, but only became practical in the mid-2000s with deepened understanding of topology, which concerns itself with geometric objects whose properties remain the same even when the objects undergo extreme deformation. Researchers experimentally discovered topological materials even more recently, using the tools of quantum physics.

Within this domain, topological semimetals, which share qualities of both metals and semiconductors, are of special interest to Nguyen.They offer high levels of thermal and electric conductivity, and inherent robustness, which makes them very promising for applications in microelectronics, energy conversions, and quantum computing, he says.

Intrigued by the possibilities that might emerge from such unconventional physics, Nguyen is pursuing two related but distinct areas of research: On the one hand, Im trying to identify and then synthesize new, robust topological semimetals, and on the other, I want to detect fundamental new physics with neutrons and further design new devices.

On a fast research track

Reaching these goals over the next few years might seem a tall order. But at MIT, Nguyen has seized every opportunity to master the specialized techniques required for conducting large-scale experiments with topological materials, and getting results. Guided by his advisor,Mingda Li, the Norman C Rasmussen Assistant Professor and director of theQuantum Matter Group within NSE, Nguyen was able to dive into significant research even before he set foot on campus.

The summer, before I joined the group, Mingda sent me on a trip to Argonne National Laboratory for a very fun experiment that used synchrotron X-ray scattering to characterize topological materials, recalls Nguyen. Learning the techniques got me fascinated in the field, and I started to see my future.

During his first two years of graduate school, he participated in four studies, serving as a lead author in three journal papers. In one notable project,described earlier this year in Physical Review Letters, Nguyen and fellow Quantum Matter Group researchers demonstrated, through experiments conducted at three national laboratories, unexpected phenomena involving the way electrons move through a topological semimetal, tantalum phosphide (TaP).

These materials inherently withstand perturbations such as heat and disorders, and can conduct electricity with a level of robustness, says Nguyen. With robust properties like this, certain materials can conductivity electricity better than best metals, and in some circumstances superconductors which is an improvement over current generation materials.

This discovery opens the door to topological quantum computing. Current quantum computing systems, where the elemental units of calculation are qubits that perform superfast calculations, require superconducting materials that only function in extremely cold conditions. Fluctuations in heat can throw one of these systems out of whack.

The properties inherent to materials such as TaP could form the basis of future qubits, says Nguyen. He envisions synthesizing TaP and other topological semimetals a process involving the delicate cultivation of these crystalline structures and then characterizing their structural and excitational properties with the help of neutron and X-ray beam technology, which probe these materials at the atomic level. This would enable him to identify and deploy the right materials for specific applications.

My goal is to create programmable artificial structured topological materials, which can directly be applied as a quantum computer, says Nguyen. With infinitely better heat management, these quantum computing systems and devices could prove to be incredibly energy efficient.

Physics for the environment

Energy efficiency and its benefits have long concerned Nguyen. A native of Montreal, Quebec, with an aptitude for math and physics and a concern for climate change, he devoted his final year of high school to environmental studies. I worked on a Montreal initiative to reduce heat islands in the city by creating more urban parks, he says. Climate change mattered to me, and I wanted to make an impact.

At McGill University, he majored in physics. I became fascinated by problems in the field, but I also felt I could eventually apply what I learned to fulfill my goals of protecting the environment, he says.

In both classes and research, Nguyen immersed himself in different domains of physics. He worked for two years in a high-energy physics lab making detectors for neutrinos, part of a much larger collaboration seeking to verify the Standard Model. In the fall of his senior year at McGill, Nguyens interest gravitated toward condensed matter studies. I really enjoyed the interplay between physics and chemistry in this area, and especially liked exploring questions in superconductivity, which seemed to have many important applications, he says. That spring, seeking to add useful skills to his research repertoire, he worked at Ontarios Chalk River Laboratories, where he learned to characterize materials using neutron spectroscopes and other tools.

These academic and practical experiences served to propel Nguyen toward his current course of graduate study. Mingda Li proposed an interesting research plan, and although I didnt know much about topological materials, I knew they had recently been discovered, and I was excited to enter the field, he says.

Man with a plan

Nguyen has mapped out the remaining years of his doctoral program, and they will prove demanding. Topological semimetals are difficult to work with, he says. We dont yet know the optimal conditions for synthesizing them, and we need to make these crystals, which are micrometers in scale, in quantities large enough to permit testing.

With the right materials in hand, he hopes to develop a qubit structure that isnt so vulnerable to perturbations, quickly advancing the field of quantum computing so that calculations that now take years might require just minutes or seconds, he says. Vastly higher computational speeds could have enormous impacts on problems like climate, or health, or finance that have important ramifications for society. If his research on topological materials benefits the planet or improves how people live, says Nguyen, I would be totally happy.

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Cracking the secrets of an emerging branch of physics - MIT News

Just this week the Senate had a hearing, ostensibly about speech on internet platforms. But what the hearing was really about was our continuing inability to figure out what to do with a technological infrastructure that gives every single person on the planet the ability to broadcast their thoughts, whether illuminating or poisonous. We know that solutions are elusive, especially in the context of our current electoral issues. But this is actually one of the less vexing conundrums that technology has dropped on our lap. What are we going to do about Crispr? How are we going to handle artificial intelligence, before it handles us? A not-encouraging sign of our ability to deal with change: While we werent looking, smart phones have made us cyborgs.

Heres another example of a change that might later look more significant than our current focus: Late last year, Google announced it had achieved Quantum Supremacy, This means that it solved a problem with its experimental quantum computer that couldnt be solved with a conventional one, or even a supercomputer.

Its a forgone conclusion that quantum computing is going to happen. When it does, what we thought was a speed limit will evaporate. Nobodynobody!has an idea of what can come from this. I bet it might even be bigger than whatever Donald Trump will do in a second (or third or fourth) term, or the civil disorder that might erupt if he isnt returned to the Peoples House.

A few days after the election, on that same West Coast trip, I had a random street encounter with one of the most important leaders in technology. We spoke informally for maybe 15 or 20 minutes about what had happened. He seemed shattered by the outcome, but no more than pretty much everyone I knew. He told me that he asked himself, should I have done more? Like all of the top people in the industry, he has since had to make his accommodations with the Trump administration. But as with all his peers, he has not relented on his drive to create new technology that will continue the remarkable and worrisome transformation of humanity.

The kind of people who work for him will keep doing what they do. Maybe they will no longer want to work for a company thats overly concerned about winning the favoror avoiding the disfavorof a president who they think is racist, a president who despises immigrants (wife and in-laws excepted), a president who encourages dictators and casts doubts on voting. If things get bad in this country, a lot of those engineers and scientists will leave, and a lot of other countries will welcome them. The adventure will continue. Even if the United States as we know it does not last another generation, scientists will continue advancing artificial intelligence, brain-machine interfaces, and, of course, quantum computing. And thats what our time will be known for.

Yes, a thousand years from now, historians will study the Donald Trump phenomenon and what it meant for our gutsy little experiment in democracy, as well as for the world at large. I am still confident, however, that historians will find more importance in learning about the moments in our lifetimes when science changed everything.

What I am not confident about is predicting how those future historians will do their work, and to what extent people of our time would regard those historians as human beings, or some exotic quantum Crispr-ed cyborgs. Thats something that Donald Trump will have no hand in. And why its so important, even as politics intrude on our everyday existence, to do the work of chronicling this great and fearsome adventure.

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Quantum Computing Is Bigger Than Donald Trump - WIRED

Supermarket aisles filled with fresh produce are probably not where you would expect to discover some of the first benefits of quantum computing.

But Canadian grocery chain Save-On-Foods has become an unlikely pioneer, using quantum technology to improve the management of in-store logistics. In collaboration with quantum computing company D-Wave, Save-On-Foods is using a new type of computing, which is based on the downright weird behaviour of matter at the quantum level. And it's already seeing promising results.

The company's engineers approached D-Wave with a logistics problem that classical computers were incapable of solving. Within two months, the concept had translated into a hybrid quantum algorithm that was running in one of the supermarket stores, reducing the computing time for some tasks from 25 hours per week down to mere seconds.

SEE: Guide to Becoming a Digital Transformation Champion (TechRepublic Premium)

Save-On-Foods is now looking at expanding the technology to other stores, and exploring new ways that quantum could help with other issues. "We now have the capability to run tests and simulations by adjusting variables and see the results, so we can optimize performance, which simply isn't feasible using traditional methods," a Save-On-Foods spokesperson tells ZDNet.

"While the results are outstanding, the two most important things from this are that we were able to use quantum computing to attack our most complex problems across the organization, and can do it on an ongoing basis."

The remarkable properties of quantum computing boil down to the behaviour of qubits -- the quantum equivalent of classical bits that encode information for today's computers in strings of 0s and 1s. But contrary to bits, which can be represented by either 0 or 1, qubits can take on a state that is quantum-specific, in which they exist as 0 and 1 in parallel, or superposition.

Qubits, therefore, enable quantum algorithms to run various calculations at the same time, and at exponential scale: the more qubits, the more variables can be explored, and all in parallel. Some of the largest problems, which would take classical computers tens of thousands of years to explore with single-state bits, could be harnessed by qubits in minutes.

The challenge lies in building quantum computers that contain enough qubits for useful calculations to be carried out. Qubits are temperamental: they are error-prone, hard to control, and always on the verge of falling out of their quantum state. Typically, scientists have to encase quantum computers in extremely cold, large-scale refrigerators, just to make sure that qubits remain stable. That's impractical, to say the least.

This is, in essence, why quantum computing is still in its infancy. Most quantum computers currently work with less than 100 qubits, and tech giants such as IBM and Google are racing to increase that number in order to build a meaningful quantum computer as early as possible. Recently, IBM ambitiously unveiled a roadmap to a million-qubit system, and said that it expects a fault-tolerant quantum computer to be an achievable goal during the next ten years.

IBM's CEO Arvind Krishna and director of research Dario Gil in front of a ten-foot-tall super-fridge for the company's next-generation quantum computers.

Although it's early days for quantum computing, there is still plenty of interest from businesses willing to experiment with what could prove to be a significant development. "Multiple companies are conducting learning experiments to help quantum computing move from the experimentation phase to commercial use at scale," Ivan Ostojic, partner at consultant McKinsey, tells ZDNet.

Certainly tech companies are racing to be seen as early leaders. IBM's Q Network started running in 2016 to provide developers and industry professionals with access to the company's quantum processors, the latest of which, a 65-qubit device called Hummingbird, was released on the platform last month. Recently, US multinational Honeywell took its first steps on the quantum stage, making the company's trapped-ion quantum computer available to customers over the cloud. Rigetti Computing, which has been operating since 2017, is also providing cloud-based access to a 31-qubit quantum computer.

Another approach, called quantum annealing, is especially suitable for optimisation tasks such as the logistics problems faced by Save-On-Foods. D-Wave has proven a popular choice in this field, and has offered a quantum annealer over the cloud since 2010, which it has now upgraded to a 5,000-qubit-strong processor.

A quantum annealing processor is much easier to control and operate than the devices that IBM, Honeywell and Rigetti are working on, which are called gate-model quantum computers. This is why D-Wave's team has already hit much higher numbers of qubits. However, quantum annealing is only suited to specific optimisation problems, and experts argue that the technology will be comparatively limited when gate-model quantum computers reach maturity.

The suppliers of quantum processing power are increasingly surrounded by third-party companies that act as intermediaries with customers. Zapata, QC Ware or 1QBit, for example, provide tools ranging from software stacks to training, to help business leaders get started with quantum experiments.

SEE: What is the quantum internet? Everything you need to know about the weird future of quantum networks

In other words, the quantum ecosystem is buzzing with activity, and is growing fast. "Companies in the industries where quantum will have the greatest potential for complete disruption should get involved in quantum right now," says Ostojic.

And the exponential compute power of quantum technologies, according to the analyst, will be a game-changer in many fields. Qubits, with their unprecedented ability to solve optimisation problems, will benefit any organisation with a supply chain and distribution route, while shaking up the finance industry by maximising gains from portfolios. Quantum-infused artificial intelligence also holds huge promise, with models expected to benefit from better training on bigger datasets.

One example: by simulating molecular interactions that are too complex for classical computers to handle, qubits will let biotech companies fast-track the discovery of new drugs and materials. Microsoft, for example, has already demonstrated how quantum computers can help manufacture fertilizers with better yields. This could have huge implications for the agricultural sector, as it faces the colossal task of sustainably feeding the growing global population in years to come.

Chemistry, oil and gas, transportation, logistics, banking and cybersecurity are often cited as sectors that quantum technology could significantly transform. "In principle, quantum will be relevant for all CIOs as it will accelerate solutions to a large range of problems," says Ostojic. "Those companies need to become owners of quantum capability."

Chemistry, oil and gas, transportation, logistics, banking or cybersecurity are among the industries that are often pointed to as examples of the fields that quantum technology could transform.

There is a caveat. No CIO should expect to achieve too much short-term value from quantum computing in its current form. However fast-growing the quantum industry is, the field remains defined by the stubborn instability of qubits, which still significantly limits the capability of quantum computers.

"Right now, there is no problem that a quantum computer can solve faster than a classical computer, which is of value to a CIO," insists Heike Riel, head of science and technology at IBM Research Quantum Europe. "But you have to be very careful, because the technology is evolving fast. Suddenly, there might be enough qubits to solve a problem that is of high value to a business with a quantum computer."

And when that day comes, there will be a divide between the companies that prepared for quantum compute power, and those that did not. This is what's at stake for business leaders who are already playing around with quantum, explains Riel. Although no CIO expects quantum to deliver value for the next five to ten years, the most forward-thinking businesses are already anticipating the wave of innovation that the technology will bring about eventually -- so that when it does, they will be the first to benefit from it.

This means planning staffing, skills and projects, and building an understanding of how quantum computing can help solve actual business problems. "This is where a lot of work is going on in different industries, to figure out what the true problems are, which can be solved with a quantum computer and not a classical computer, and which would make a big difference in terms of value," says Riel.

Riel points to the example of quantum simulation for battery development, which companies like car manufacturer Daimler are investigating in partnership with IBM. To increase the capacity and speed-of-charging of batteries for electric vehicles, Daimler's researchers are working on next-generation lithium-sulfur batteries, which require the alignment of various compounds in the most stable configuration possible. To find the best placement of molecules, all the possible interactions between the particles that make up the compound's molecules must be simulated.

This task can be carried out by current supercomputers for simple molecules, but a large-scale quantum solution could one day break new ground in developing the more complex compounds that are required for better batteries.

"Of course, right now the molecules we are simulating with quantum are small in size because of the limited size of the quantum computer," says Riel. "But when we scale the next generation of quantum computers, then we can solve the problem despite the complexity of the molecules."

SEE: 10 tech predictions that could mean huge changes ahead

Similar thinking led oil and gas giant ExxonMobilto join the network of companies that are currently using IBM's cloud-based quantum processors. ExxonMobil started collaborating with IBM in 2019, with the objective of one day using quantum to design new chemicals for low energy processing and carbon capture.

The company's director of corporate strategic research Amy Herhold explains that for the past year, ExxonMobil's scientists have been tapping IBM's quantum capabilities to simulate macroscopic material properties such as heat capacity. The team has focused so far on the smallest of molecules, hydrogen gas, and is now working on ways to scale the method up to larger molecules as the hardware evolves.

A number of milestones still need to be achieved before quantum computing translates into an observable business impact, according to Herhold. Companies will need to have access to much larger quantum computers with low error rates, as well as to appropriate quantum algorithms that address key problems.

"While today's quantum computers cannot solve business-relevant problems -- they are too small and the qubits are too noisy -- the field is rapidly advancing," Herhold tells ZDNet. "We know that research and development is critical on both the hardware and the algorithm front, and given how different this is from classical computing, we knew it would take time to build up our internal capabilities. This is why we decided to get going."

Herhold anticipates that quantum hardware will grow at a fast pace in the next five years. The message is clear: when it does, ExxonMobil's research team will be ready.

One industry that has shown an eager interest in quantum technology is the financial sector. From JP Morgan Chase's partnerships with IBM and Honeywell, to BBVA's use of Zapata's services, banks are actively exploring the potential of qubits, and with good reason. Quantum computers, by accounting for exponentially high numbers of factors and variables, could generate much better predictions of financial risk and uncertainty, and boost the efficiency of key operations such as investment portfolio optimisation or options pricing.

Similar to other fields, most of the research is dedicated to exploring proof-of-concepts for the financial industry. In fact, when solving smaller problems, scientists still run quantum algorithms alongside classical computers to validate the results.

"The classical simulator has an exact answer, so you can check if you're getting this exact answer with the quantum computer," explains Tony Uttley, president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions, as he describes the process of quantum options pricing in finance.

"And you better be, because as soon as we cross that boundary, where we won't be able to classically simulate anymore, you better be convinced that your quantum computer is giving you the right answer. Because that's what you'll be taking into your business processes."

Companies that are currently working on quantum solutions are focusing on what Uttley calls the "path to value creation". In other words, they are using quantum capabilities as they stand to run small-scale problems, building trust in the technology as they do so, while they wait for capabilities to grow and enable bigger problems to be solved.

In many fields, most of the research is dedicated to exploring proof-of-concepts for quantum computing in industry.

Tempting as it might be for CIOs to hope for short-term value from quantum services, it's much more realistic to look at longer timescales, maintains Uttley. "Imagine you have a hammer, and somebody tells you they want to build a university campus with it," he says. "Well, looking at your hammer, you should ask yourself how long it's going to take to build that."

Quantum computing holds the promise that the hammer might, in the next few years, evolve into a drill and then a tower crane. The challenge, for CIOs, is to plan now for the time that the tools at their disposal get the dramatic boost that's expected by scientists and industry players alike.

It is hard to tell exactly when that boost will come. IBM's roadmap announces that the company will reach 1,000 qubits in 2023, which could mark the start of early value creation in pharmaceuticals and chemicals, thanks to the simulation of small molecules. But although the exact timeline is uncertain, Uttley is adamant that it's never too early to get involved.

"Companies that are forward-leaning already have teams focused on this and preparing their organisations to take advantage of it once we cross the threshold to value creation," he says. "So what I tend to say is: engage now. The capacity is scarce, and if you're not already at the front of the line, it may be quite a while before you get in."

Creating business value is a priority for every CIO. At the same time, the barrier to entry for quantum computing is lowering every time a new startup emerges to simplify the software infrastructure and assist non-experts in kickstarting their use of the technology. So there's no time to lose in embracing the technology. Securing a first-class spot in the quantum revolution, when it comes, is likely to be worth it.

Here is the original post:
Quantum computers are coming. Get ready for them to change everything - ZDNet

Applied mathematician Peter Shor says government agencies could be the first to figure out a way to enable quantum computers to break algorithms that keep Bitcoin and the internet secure.

In an interview with Nature Magazine, the MIT professor of applied mathematics talks about the looming possibility that quantum computers can crack encryption keys, called RSA, that keep the internet and cryptocurrencies safe from security threats. Shor says that if theres anyone who can break the RSA first, it will be government bodies such as the National Security Agency (NSA).

The first people who break RSA either are going to be NSA or some other big organization. At first, these computers will be slow. If you have a computer that can only break, say, one RSA key per hour, anything thats not a high priority or a national-security risk is not going to be broken. The NSA has much more important things to use their quantum computer on than reading your e-mail theyll be reading the Chinese ambassadors e-mail.

Crypto enthusiasts are keeping close tabs on developments in the quantum computing space as the technology threatens to break the cryptographic algorithms that keep cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin secure. The World Economic Forum describes how quantum computing machines can crack the existing standards of encryption.

The sheer calculating ability of a sufficiently powerful and error-corrected quantum computer means that public-key cryptography is destined to fail, and would put the technology used to protect many of todays fundamental digital systems and activities at risk.

Recently, industrial powerhouse Honeywell announced that it built the System Model H1 quantum computer, which the company touts generates the highest quantum volume in the entire industry.

As to whether quantum computing poses an existential threat to the crypto industry, Ripple CTO David Schwartz says it could become powerful enough to break cryptographic algorithms within a decade.

I think we have at least eight years. I have very high confidence that its at least a decade before quantum computing presents a threat, but you never know when there could be a breakthrough. Im a cautious and concerned observer, I would say.

Featured Image: Shutterstock/archy13

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Quantum Computing Expert Warns Governments May Be First to Crack Algorithms Keeping Bitcoin and the Internet Secure - The Daily Hodl

Archer CEO Dr Mohammad Choucair and quantum technology manager Dr Martin Fuechsle

Quantum computing will revolutionise the world; its potential is so immeasurable that the greatest minds in Redmond, Armonk, and Silicon Valley are spending big on quantum development. But a company by the name of Archer Materials wants to put Sydney, Australia, on the map alongside, if not ahead, of these tech giants.

Universal quantum computers leverage the quantum mechanical phenomena of superposition and entanglement to create states that scale exponentially with the number of quantum bits (qubits).

Here's an explanation: What is quantum computing? Understanding the how, why and when of quantum computers

"Quantum computing represents the next generation of powerful computing, you don't really have to know how your phone works on the inside, you just want it to do things that you couldn't do before," Archer CEO Dr Mohammad Choucair told ZDNet.

"And with quantum computing, you can do things that you couldn't necessarily do before."

There is currently a very small set number of tasks that a quantum computer can do, but Choucair is hopeful that in the future this will grow to be a little bit more consumer-based and business-faced.

Right now, however, quantum computing, for all intents and purposes, is at a very early stage. It's not going to completely displace a classical computer, but it will give the capacity to do more with what we currently have. Choucair believes this will positively impact a range of sectors that are reliant on an increasing amount of computational power.

"This comes to light when you start to want to optimise very large portfolios, or perform a whole bunch of data crunching, AI and all sorts of buzzwords -- but ultimately, you're looking for more computational power. And you can genuinely get speed-ups in computational power based on certain algorithms for certain problems that are currently being identified," he explained.

"The problems that quantum computers can solve are currently being identified and the end users are being engaged."

Archer describes itself as a materials technology company. Its proposition is simple at heart: "Materials are the tangible physical basis of all technology. We're developing and integrating materials to address complex global challenges in quantum technology, human health, and reliable energy".

There are many components to quantum computing, but Archer is building a qubit processor. 12CQ is touted by the company as a "world-first technology that Archer aims to build for quantum computing operation at room-temperature and integration onboard modern electronic devices".

"We're not building the entire computer, we're building the chipset, the processer at the core of it," Choucair told ZDNet. "That really forms the brain of a quantum computer.

"The difference with us is that we really are looking at on-board use, rather than the heavy infrastructure that's required to house the existing quantum computing architectures.

"This is not all airy-fairy and it is not all of blue sky; it's real, there's proven potential, we've published the workwe have the data, we have the science behind us -- it took seven years of immense, immersive R&D."

Archer is building the chip inside a AU$180 million prototype foundry out of the University of Sydney. The funding was provided by the university as well as government.

"Everyone's playing their role to get this to market," he said.

Choucair is convinced that the potential when Archer "gets this right" will be phenomenal.

"Once you get a minimal viable product, and you can demonstrate the technology can indeed work at room temperature and be integrated into modern-day electronics. I think that's, that's quite disruptive. And it's quite exciting," he said.

Magnified region observing the round qubit clusters which are billionths of a meter in size in the centre of qubit control device components (appearing as parallel lines).

Choucair found himself at Archer in 2017 after the company acquired a startup he founded. Straight away, he and the board got started on the strategy it's currently executing on.

"There is very, very small margin for error from the start, in the middle, at the end -- you need to know what you're getting yourself into, what you're doingthis is why I think we've been able to be so successful moving forward, we've been so rapid in our development, because we know exactly what needs to get done," Choucair said.

"The chip is a world firstscience can fail at any stage, everybody knows that, but more often than not, it may or may not -- how uncertain do you want something to be? So for us, the more and more we develop our chip, the higher chances of success become."

Read more about Archer's commercial strategy here: Archer looks to commercialisation future with graphene-based biosensor tech

Choucair said materials technology itself was able to reduce a lot of the commercial barriers to entry for Archer, which meant the company could take the work out of the university much sooner.

"The material technology allowed us to do things without the need for heavy cooling infrastructure, which costs millions and millions of dollars and had to be housed in buildings that cost millions and millions of dollars,' he explained. "Massive barrier reduced, material could be made simply from common laboratory agents, which means you didn't have to build a billion-dollar facility to control atoms and do all these crazy scientific things at the atomic level.

"And so, really, you end up with the materials technology that was simple to handle, easy to make, and worked at room temperature, and you're like, wow, okay, so now the job for us is to actually build the chip and miniaturise this stuff, which is challenging in itself."

The CEO of the unexplainable has an impressive resum. He landed at Archer with a strong technical background in nanotechnology, served a two-year mandate on the World Economic Forum Global Council for Advanced Materials, is a fellow of both The Royal Society of New South Wales and The Royal Australian Chemical Institute, and was an academic and research fellow at the University of Sydney's School of Chemistry.

Choucair also has in his armoury Dr Martin Fuechsle, who is recognised for developing the world's smallest transistor, a "single-atom transistor".

"Fuechsle is among the few highly talented physicists in the world capable of building quantum devices that push the boundaries of current information processing technology," Choucair said in January 2019, announcing Fuechsle's appointment. "His skills, experience, and exceptional track record strongly align to Archer's requirements for developing our key vertical of quantum technology."

SEE:Guide to Becoming a Digital Transformation Champion(TechRepublic Premium)

Archer is publicly listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, but Choucair would reject any claims of it being a crazy proposition.

"20 years ago, a company that was maybe offering something as abstract as an online financial payment system would have been insane too, but if you have a look at the top 10 companies on the Nasdaqa lot of their core business is embedded in the development of computational architecture, computational hardware," he said.

"We're a very small company, I'm not comparing myself to a Nasdaq-listed company. I'm just saying, the core businessI think it's a unique offering and differentiates us on a stock exchange."

He said quantum technology is something that people are starting to value and see as having potential and scale of opportunity.

Unlike many of the other quantum players in Australia and abroad, Archer is not a result of a spin-off from a university, Choucair claimed.

"The one thing about Archer is that we're not a university spin out -- I think that's what sets us apart, not just in Australia, but globally," he said. "A lot of the time, the quantum is at a university, this is where you go to learn about quantum computing, so it's only natural that it does come out of a university."

Historically, Australia has a reputation of being bad at commercialising research and development. But our curriculum vitae speaks for itself: Spray-on skin, the black box flight recorder, polymer bank notes, and the Cochlear implant, to name a few.

According to Choucair, quantum is next.

"We really are leading the world; we well and truly punch above our weight when it comes to the work that's been done, we lead the world," he said.

"And that quantum technology is across quantum computing and photonics, and sensing -- it's not just quantum computing. We do have a lot of great scientists and those who are developing the technology."

But as highlighted in May by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in its quantum technologies roadmap, there are a lot of gaps that need to be filled over the long term.

"We just have to go out there and get the job done," Choucair said.

"In Australia we have resource constraints, just like anywhere else in the world. And I think there's always a lot more that can be donewe're not doing deep tech as a luxury in this country. From the very top down, there is an understanding, I believe, from our government and from key institutes in the nation that this is what will help us drive forward as a nation."

Archer isn't the only group focused on the promise of quantum tech down under, but Choucair said there's no animosity within the Aussie ecosystem.

Read about UNSW's efforts: Australia's ambitious plan to win the quantum race

There's also a partnership between two universities: UNSW and Sydney Uni quantum partnership already bearing fruit

"I think we all understand that there's a greater mission at stake here. And we all want, I can't speak on everyone's behalf, but at Archer we definitely have vision of making quantum computing widespread -- adopted by consumers and businesses, that's something that we really want to do," he said.

"We have fantastic support here in Australia, there's no doubt about it."

A lot of the work in the quantum space is around education, as Choucair said, it's not something that just comes out of abstractness and then just exists.

"You have to remember this stuff's all been built off 20, 30, 40 years of research and development, quantum mechanics, engineering, science, and tech -- hundreds and thousands of brilliant minds over the course of two-three generations," the CEO explained.

While the technology is here, and people are building algorithms that only run on quantum computers, there is still another 20-or-so years of development to follow.

"This field is not a fast follower field, you don't just get up in the morning and put your slippers on and say you're going to build a quantum computer," he added.

Archer is also part of the IBM Q Network, which is a global network of startups, Fortune 500 companies, and academic research institutes that have access to IBM's experts, developer tools, and cloud-based quantum systems through IBM Q Cloud.

Archer joined the network in May as the first Australian company that's developing a qubit processor.

Choucair said the work cannot be done without partnerships and collaboration alongside the best in the world.

"Yes, there is a race to build quantum computers, but I think more broadly than a race, to just enable the widespread adoption of the technology. And that's not easy. And that takes a concerted effort," he said. "And at this early stage of development, there is a lot of overlap and collaboration.

"There's a bit of a subculture that Australia can't do it -- yeah, we can.

"There's no excuses, right? We're doing it, we're building it, we're getting there. We're working with the very best in the world."

Read more here:
Australia's Archer and its plan for quantum world domination - ZDNet

Quantum computers will support powerful commercial applications by solving currently intractable problems. We consider the pathway to bringing this technology to market, and some of the related legal issues.

Even with the biggest supercomputers in the world, some problems remain too complex to unravel.

This is not just an academic issue many valuable commercial applications can be imagined but not delivered, or can currently only be delivered in a limited, constrained way. This includes:

As our guest speaker Michael Beverland of Microsoft Quantum explained at our recent webinar , these are the kinds of problem which quantum computers are expected to be able to resolve. The ability to solve "intractable" problems is expected to be transformative in ways we can currently only guess at. From a legal and policy perspective, quantum computing is already considered to be a strategic technology in many jurisdictions, potentially subject to export controls and with increasing scrutiny around investments and acquisitions concerning businesses in this field.

Mathematicians have already proved that quantum computing will be able to outperform classical computing in relation to cybersecurity. It will be possible to break currently secure forms of encryption such as RSA with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. We'll be considering this issue and the resulting legal risks at a further webinar.

The power of qubits

Quantum computing is different to classical computing in every sense. It rethinks computer processing by structuring it around the utterly different physics that applies at the sub-atomic level quantum mechanics. Classical computers rely on processing bits in two alternative states: one or zero. However large and sophisticated the machine, each bit represents a single state and processing happens in a linear fashion, one task at a time.

Put very simply, quantum processing units, or "qubits", work differently: not only can an infinite number of positions be represented on a single qubit, but an individual qubit interacts with all other qubits in the system. This means that their states can be understood simultaneously, rather than the sequential approach of single state bits of classical computing. With a sufficiently large quantum computer, all elements of a problem can be represented and processed at the same time.

As the number of qubits in a single system increases, its processing power increases exponentially. So a 20 qubit machine is loosely as powerful as a smart phone; a 30 qubit machine is comparable to a laptop and a 50 qubit machine roughly the point which quantum hardware development has currently reached is equal to the world's most powerful supercomputers.

The aspiration of quantum computing researchers is to build far greater quantum computers which can unravel currently intractable problems. This is not just a matter of increasing the qubits: a further challenge is the currently high error rate in outputs. As this is addressed, the useable power of a quantum computer will increase.

The timeframe for change

Forecasting when quantum systems will reach the point where they can solve these complex problems depends on the problem. Not all intractable problems are equal. As Michael explained in our webinar, modelling certain molecules, for example, is likely to be achieved some time before RSA 2048 encryption will be broken. Views differ, but some predictions put the advent of game-changing machines as close as five years away.

Systems that harness quantum mechanics in less complex ways are also being developed and are already available commercially quantum annealing machines are one such example, which can be used for addressing optimisation problems. Even if scalable quantum computing is not yet with us, many businesses are already involved or investing in pathway projects to expand ideas about what can be achieved, and to build understanding of how to deliver those ideas.

Bringing the technology to market

Developments in relation to hardware tend to get the most publicity, but extensive and difficult work is also needed to create the full software stack. This technology promises to be a whole new ecosystem within the tech sector. Michael commented that this multidisciplinary research requires physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and various engineering specialisms; and that significant problems remain in each field.

The complexity of the hardware is one factor driving the expectation that the commercial delivery of quantum computing will follow the cloud services model quantum computing "as a Service". This expectation is reinforced by the ubiquitous shift into cloud-based delivery for processing of all types.

Liability frameworks

How will "Quantum-as-a-Service" develop? Cloud services contracts for full stack applications are well established. Granting "Beta" access to software and systems which are still in development is also common. Nevertheless, the particularities of quantum computing may require rethinking the contractual frameworks for suppliers and users of this technology.

For example, liability under English law requires foreseeability of harm. Exclusion clauses seek to deal with losses that flowed naturally from the breach of contract and were in the contemplation of the parties. The complex and "spooky" interactions of the qubits at the heart of a quantum system will remain considerably less stable, and potentially also less predictable, than the robust reliability of classical systems for some time to come. Such complexity may mean that it is much more difficult for the parties to anticipate the difficulties which could arise. As commercial access to these systems develops, it may well be that a new approach is needed to framing and allocating liability.

It may also be that there is greater scope for negotiating bespoke cloud-based access than would usually be the case with the major cloud service providers. Smaller scale access to the technology at lower contract values may well be on standard terms and conditions, with limited flexibility. But strategic partnerships may well be bespoke arrangements, particularly in the early years and particularly for projects which feed into greater understanding of how to harness the power of quantum systems, and which develop and expand understanding of commercial applications.

Service levels

Similarly, although overall performance is expected to be higher, the lower stability and higher error rate (compared to classical systems) of quantum computing may also mean that the parameters for measuring service levels need to be re-thought. The ways of proving the level of service actually delivered to the service user may equally require a fresh approach given how quantum computing solutions operate.

Quantum computing is currently in its early, pioneering phase similar to classical computing in the middle of the last century, before silicon or miniaturisation and before anyone had any concept of how the internet, smart phones or machine learning would change how we operate. We are looking forward to working with our clients to realise and deliver this exciting new era of computing.

If you'd like to discuss the issues discussed above further, please dont hesitate to contact the authors or your usual Osborne Clarke contact.

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Quantum computing | Ground-breaking commercial opportunities from solving the (as yet) unsolvable - Lexology

DOE Selects Reactor Projects for New Demonstration Program

On Oct. 13, the Department of Energy announced awards of $80 million each for two nuclear reactor development projects, funding the first year of new cost-sharing partnerships that aim to demonstrate working prototypes. One of the recipients is TerraPower, a venture backed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates that is developing a reactor design known as Natrium, which uses molten salt as a coolant and aims to be more economical than traditional nuclear power plants. The other recipient is X-energy, which is developing a reactor called Xe-100 that is cooled by helium gas and fueled by TRISO (TRi-structural ISOtropic) fuel pellets that are designed to make meltdowns impossible and enable refueling without a plant shutdown. Congress created the demonstration program through last years appropriations legislation and, while the Trump administration has proposed discontinuing the awards, DOE anticipates it will spend a total of $3.2 billion on them over the next seven years if the funding is made available. The department also expects to make smaller awards in December to between two and five reactor development projects for reducing technical risks, and to at least two early-stage reactor concept development projects. Through its Project Pele, the Defense Department is also funding the development of three TRISO-based designs for mobile nuclear reactors, including one proposed by X-energy, and may eventually support one of the projects through to a prototype demonstration.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Oct. 17 that Chinese government representatives have privately warned U.S. officials that Americans in China may be detained in response to recent arrests of scientists with ties to Chinas military. This summer, the Department of Justice charged three visiting researchers and one graduate student with visa fraud, alleging they lied about their connections to the Chinese military on visa applications. It also charged a visiting researcher for destroying a hard drive, arguing the act interfered with an investigation into possible transfer of sensitive software to Chinas National University of Defense Technology. The department did not confirm the threats to the Journal, but stated, We are aware that the Chinese government has, in other instances, detained American, Canadian, and other individuals without legal basis to retaliate against lawful prosecutions and to exert pressure on their governments, with a callous disregard of the individuals involved. In 2018, China arrested two Canadian citizens shortly after Canada detained the chief financial officer of the telecommunications company Huawei, whom the U.S. had charged with evading sanctions against Iran.

The American Physical Society announced last week it has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the State Department seeking details on therecent revocation of more than 1,000 visas held by Chinese students and researchers. A May 2020 proclamation by President Trump empowered the department to cancel visas for certain Chinese graduate students and researchers deemed to have current or past ties to an unnamed set of institutions affiliated with the Chinese military. APS states that no administration officials they met with could or were willing to provide any details, such as: an example of a case of student espionage involving university basic research; the number of students the administration claims have engaged in or are charged with espionage; or, an estimate of the impact to the U.S. of the alleged espionage that would form the basis for the proclamation. The FOIA request seeks all internal policy documents related to the proclamation, the names of institutions it applies to, and the names of the U.S. institutions the visa holders were planning to attend, among other details. The request argues, Lacking any public explanation, the denial of visas will only contribute to the growing view that the United States is unwelcoming to foreigners and thereby diminish the ability of the United States to attract top talent, as the APS has seen in its annual survey of international students. (APS is an AIP Member Society.)

The White House published a National Strategy for Critical and Emerging Technologies last week that outlines general steps the U.S. is taking to bolster the National Security Innovation Base and protect technology advantage, such as fostering public-private partnerships and expanding export controls. The strategy also lists 20 broad types of critical and emerging technologies that are identified as priorities across the government. The list overlaps with the White Houses Industries of the Future framework and includes additional items such as energy technologies and chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear mitigation technologies. In a statement on the strategy, the Commerce Department highlighted its implementation of multilateral export controls on certain emerging technologies pursuant to the Export Control Reform Act of 2018. The latest set, published this month, applies to hybrid additive manufacturing/computer numerically controlled tools; computational lithography software designed for the fabrication of extreme ultraviolet masks; technology for finishing wafers for five nanometer integrated circuit production; digital forensics tools that circumvent authentication or authorization controls on a computer and extract raw data; software for monitoring and analysis of communications and metadata acquired from a telecommunications service provider via a handover interface; and sub-orbital spacecraft.

On Oct. 15, the National Academies announced that its newly established National Science, Technology, and Security Roundtable will be led by MIT Vice President for Research Maria Zuber, former National Intelligence Council Chair John Gannon, and former Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Richard Meserve. The roundtable will serve as a forum for representatives of the scientific community, federal science agencies, the intelligence community, and law enforcement officials to discuss concerns and activities related to securing research against exploitation by foreign governments. Congress mandated its creation through the Securing American Science and Technology Act, enacted as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020. The National Academies has long played a role in advising the government on research security matters, such as through the 1982 Corson report and the 2009 report Beyond Fortress America.

In its quarterly tranche of recommendations released last week, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence proposes a set of broad STEM workforce development initiatives as well as more targeted efforts in microelectronics, quantum computing, and biotechnology. Among its 66 recommendations are for Congress to provide the National Science Foundation with $8 billion over five years to fund 25,000 STEM undergraduate scholarships, 5,000 STEM graduate fellowships, and 500 postdoctoral positions. It also proposes creating a National Microelectronics Scholar Program modeled on the Department of Defenses SMART scholarship-for-service program. For quantum computing, the commission recommends providing researchers with access to quantum computers through a national cloud computing infrastructure and incentivizing domestic manufacturing of component materials through tax credits and loan guarantees. The commission also calls for the White House to create a Technology Competitiveness Council chaired by the vice president to focus government attention on technological innovation.

Among the 97 recommendations released last week by the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress is a proposal to reconstitute the long-defunct Office of Technology Assessment as a Congressional Technology and Innovation Lab. The committee explains the new entity would go beyond the mandate of the original OTA by proactively studying and testing new technologies rather than waiting for directives to study technologies. It adds that the lab would employ nonpartisan experts, visiting professors, and graduate students to provide fresh perspectives to members of Congress and their staff. In recent years, there has been a renewed push within Congress to revive OTA, though House appropriators backed away from the idea this year, instead favoring continued expansion of the Government Accountability Offices Science, Technology, Assessment, and Analytics team.

The United Kingdom-based scientific journal Nature officially endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on Oct. 14.Having previously published a news article reviewing ways that President Trump has damaged science, the journal's editorsfurther evaluateTrumps record on issues connected to science and criticizes his divisive approach to politics more generally. TheyargueBiden would chart a starkly different course on matters such as the pandemic, climate change, environmental regulation, and immigration, and urge, Joe Biden must be given an opportunity to restore trust in truth, in evidence, in science and in other institutions of democracy, heal a divided nation, and begin the urgent task of rebuilding the United States reputation in the world. While some scientific publications have broken longstanding positions of neutrality to weigh in on this years election, Nature previously backed Hillary Clinton in 2016, when it referred to Trump as a demagogue not fit for high office, and in 2008 it issued a more measured endorsement of Barack Obama.

More than 1,000 current and former officers of the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions Epidemiology Intelligence Service fellowship programsigned a letter published this month that proteststhe ominous politicization and silencing of the agency. Representing more than a quarter of the people who have participated in the program throughout its nearly 70 year history, the letter adds to the mounting criticism of how the Trump administration has sought control over CDCs pandemic-response efforts. This past week, the Associated Press reported that in June the Trump administration assigned two appointees to the agencys headquarters tasked with keeping an eye on CDC Director Robert Redfield, according to a half-dozen CDC and administration officials. The assignment was made during the same period that the chief spokesperson and a science adviser at the agencys parent department sought to exert control over CDC messaging and scientific products. Both those individuals departed the department last month under a cloud of scandal.

During her nomination hearing last week to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Amy Coney Barrett declined to explain her personal views on climate change when pressed by Democratic senators. In one exchange, vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked Barrett if she believes smoking causes cancer and whether coronavirus is infectious before then asking if she believes climate change is occurring. Barrett agreed that the coronavirus is infectious and smoking causes cancer, but declined to provide a direct response on climate change, stating, I will not express a view on a matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial because thats inconsistent with the judicial role. Harris observed that Barretts appointment to the court could have implications for climate policy, noting Justice Ginsberg voted in favor of the landmark 5-to-4 Massachusetts v. EPA case, which enabled the government to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

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The Week of October 19, 2020 - FYI: Science Policy News

Quantum computersare machines that use the properties of quantum physics to store data and perform calculations based on the probability of an objects state before it is measured. This can be extremely advantageous for certain tasks where they could vastlyoutperform even the best supercomputers.

Quantum computers canprocess massive and complex datasetsmore efficiently than classical computers. They use the fundamentals of quantum mechanics to speed up the process of solving complex calculations. Often, these computations incorporate a seemingly unlimited number of variables and the potential applications span industries from genomics to finance.

Classic computers, which include smartphones and laptops, carry out logical operations using the definite position of a physical state. They encode information in binary bits that can either be 0s or 1s. In quantum computing, operations instead use the quantum state of an object to produce the basic unit of memory called as a quantum bit or qubit. Qubits are made using physical systems, such as the spin of an electron or the orientation of a photon. These systems can be in many different arrangements all at once, a property known as quantum superposition. Qubits can also be inextricably linked together using a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. The result is that a series of qubits can represent different things simultaneously. These states are the undefined properties of an object before theyve been detected, such as the spin of an electron or the polarization of a photon.

Instead of having a clear position, unmeasured quantum states occur in a mixed superposition that can be entangled with those of other objects as their final outcomes will be mathematically related even. The complex mathematics behind these unsettled states of entangled spinning coins can be plugged into special algorithms to make short work of problems that would take a classical computer a long time to work out.

American physicist andNobel laureate Richard Feynmangave a note about quantum computers as early as 1959. He stated that when electronic components begin to reach microscopic scales, effects predicted by quantum mechanics occur, which might be exploited in the design of more powerful computers.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the theory of quantum computers advanced considerably beyond Feynmans early speculation. In 1985,David Deutschof the University of Oxford described the construction of quantum logic gates for a universal quantum computer.Peter Shor of AT&T devised an algorithmto factor numbers with a quantum computer that would require as few as six qubits in 1994. Later in 1998, Isaac Chuang of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Neil Gershenfeld of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Mark Kubince of the University of Californiacreated the first quantum computerwith 2 qubits, that could be loaded with data and output a solution.

Recently, Physicist David Wineland and his colleagues at the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) announced that they havecreated a 4-qubit quantum computerby entangling four ionized beryllium atoms using an electromagnetic trap. Today, quantum computing ispoised to upend entire industriesstarting from telecommunications to cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, finance medicine and beyond.

There are three primary types of quantum computing. Each type differs by the amount of processing power (qubits) needed and the number of possible applications, as well as the time required to become commercially viable.

Quantum annealing is best for solving optimization problems. Researchers are trying to find the best and most efficient possible configuration among many possible combinations of variables.

Volkswagen recently conducted a quantum experiment to optimize traffic flows in the overcrowded city of Beijing, China. The experiment was run in partnership with Google and D-Wave Systems. Canadian company D-Wave developed quantum annealer. But, it is difficult to tell whether it actually has any real quantumness so far. The algorithm could successfully reduce traffic by choosing the ideal path for each vehicle.

Quantum simulations explore specific problems in quantum physics that are beyond the capacity of classical systems. Simulating complex quantum phenomena could be one of the most important applications of quantum computing. One area that is particularly promising for simulation is modeling the effect of a chemical stimulation on a large number of subatomic particles also known as quantum chemistry.

Universal quantum computers are the most powerful and most generally applicable, but also the hardest to build. Remarkably, a universal quantum computer would likely make use of over 100,000 qubits and some estimates put it at 1M qubits. But to the disappointment, the most qubits we can access now is just 128. The basic idea behind the universal quantum computer is that you could direct the machine at any massively complex computation and get a quick solution. This includes solving the aforementioned annealing equations, simulating quantum phenomena, and more.

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Every Thing You Need to Know About Quantum Computers - Analytics Insight

Kenneth Research has published a detailed report on Quantum Computing Market which has been categorized by market size, growth indicators and encompasses detailed market analysis on macro trends and region-wise growth in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Middle East & Africa region. The report also includes the challenges that are affecting the growth of the industry and offers strategic evaluation that is required to boost the growth of the market over the period of 2019-2026.

The report covers the forecast and analysis of the Quantum Computing Market on a global and regional level. The study provides historical data from 2015 to 2019 along with a forecast from 2019-2026 based on revenue (USD Million). In 2018, the worldwide GDP stood at USD 84,740.3 Billion as compared to the GDP of USD 80,144.5 Billion in 2017, marked a growth of 5.73% in 2018 over previous year according to the data quoted by International Monetary Fund. This is likely to impel the growth of Quantum Computing Marketover the period 2019-2026.

The Final Report will cover the impact analysis of COVID-19 on this industry.

Request To Download Sample of This Strategic Report:https://www.kennethresearch.com/sample-request-10307113The report provides a unique tool for evaluating the Market, highlighting opportunities, and supporting strategic and tactical decision-making. This report recognizes that in this rapidly-evolving and competitive environment, up-to-date marketing information is essential to monitor performance and make critical decisions for growth and profitability. It provides information on trends and developments, and focuses on markets capacities and on the changing structure of the Quantum Computing.

The quantum annealing category held the largest share under the technology segment in 2019. This is attributed to successful overcoming of physical challenges to develop this technology and further incorporated in bigger systems. The BFSI category held the largest share in the quantum computing market in 2019. This is owing to the fact that the industry is growing positively across the globe, and large banks are focusing on investing in this potential technology that can enable them to streamline their business processes, along with unbeatable levels of security

Automotive to lead quantum computing market for consulting solutions during forecast periodAmong the end-user industries considered, space and defense is the largest contributor to the overall quantum computing market, and it is expected to account for a maximum share of the market in 2019. The need for secure communications and data transfer, with the demand in faster data operations, is expected to boost the demand for quantum computing consulting solutions in this industry. The market for the automotive industry is expected to grow at the highest CAGR

Quantum computing can best be defined as the use of the attributes and principles of quantum mechanics to perform calculations and solve problems. The global market for quantum computing is being driven largely by the desire to increase the capability of modeling and simulating complex data, improve the efficiency or optimization of systems or processes, and solve problems with more precision. A quantum system can process and analyze all data simultaneously and then return the best solution, along with thousands of close alternatives all within microseconds, according to a new report from Tractica.

2018 was a growth year for the market, as businesses from the BFSI sector showed tremendous interest in quantum computing and the trend is likely to continue in 2019 and beyond. Moreover, the public sector presents significant growth opportunity for the market. In the forthcoming years, the application opportunities for quantum computing is expected to expand further, which may lead to a higher commercial interest in the technology.

Market SegmentationThe report focuses on the following end-user sectors and applications for quantum computing:By Based on offering*Consulting solutions*Systems

By End-user sectors*Government.*Academic.*Healthcare.*Military.*Geology/energy.*Information technology.*Transport/logistics.*Finance/economics.*Meteorology.*Chemicals.

By Applications*Basic research.*Quantum simulation.*Optimization problems.*Sampling.

By Regional AnanlysisNorth America*U.S.*Canada

Europe*Germany*UK*France*Italy*Spain*Belgium*Russia*Netherlands*Rest of Europe

Asia-Pacific*China*India*Japan*Korea*Singapore*Malaysia*Indonesia*Thailand*Philippines*Rest of Asia-Pacific

Latin America*Brazil*Mexico*Argentina*Rest of LATAM

Middle East & Africa*UAE*Saudi Arabia*South Africa*Rest of MEA

The quantum computing market is highly competitive with high strategic stakes and product differentiation. Some of the key market players include International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation, Telstra Corporation Limited, IonQ Inc., Silicon Quantum Computing, Huawei Investment & Holding Co. Ltd., Alphabet Inc., Rigetti & Co Inc., Microsoft Corporation, D-Wave Systems Inc., Zapata Computing Inc., and Intel Corporation.

Click Here to Download Sample Report >>https://www.kennethresearch.com/sample-request-10307113

Competitive Analysis:The Quantum Computing Market report examines competitive scenario by analyzing key players in the market. The company profiling of leading market players is included in this report with Porters five forces analysis and Value Chain analysis. Further, the strategies exercised by the companies for expansion of business through mergers, acquisitions, and other business development measures are discussed in the report. The financial parameters which are assessed include the sales, profits and the overall revenue generated by the key players of Market.

About Kenneth Research:

Kenneth Research is a reselling agency which focuses on multi-client market research database. The primary goal of the agency is to help industry professionals including various individuals and organizations gain an extra edge of competitiveness and help them identify the market trends and scope. The quality reports provided by the agency aims to make decision making easier for industry professionals and take firm decisions which helps them to form strategies after complete assessment of the market. Some of the industries under focus include healthcare & pharmaceuticals, ICT & Telecom, automotive and transportation, energy and power, chemicals, FMCG, food and beverages, aerospace and defense and others. Kenneth Research also focuses on strategic business consultancy services and offers a single platform for the best industry market research reports.

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Quantum Computing Market : Advancements and Efficient Clinical Outcomes would Drive the Industry Growth with Top Key Player's Analysis - The Daily...

Quantum computing is an area of study focused on the development of computer based technologies centered around the principles ofquantum theory. Quantum theory explains the nature and behavior of energy and matter on thequantum(atomic and subatomic) level. Quantum computing uses a combination ofbitsto perform specific computational tasks. All at a much higher efficiency than their classical counterparts. Development ofquantum computersmark a leap forward in computing capability, with massive performance gains for specific use cases. For example quantum computing excels at like simulations.

The quantum computer gains much of its processing power through the ability for bits to be in multiple states at one time. They can perform tasks using a combination of 1s, 0s and both a 1 and 0 simultaneously. Current research centers in quantum computing include MIT, IBM, Oxford University, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In addition, developers have begun gaining access toquantum computers through cloud services.

Quantum computing began with finding its essential elements. In 1981, Paul Benioff at Argonne National Labs came up with the idea of a computer that operated with quantum mechanical principles. It is generally accepted that David Deutsch of Oxford University provided the critical idea behind quantum computing research. In 1984, he began to wonder about the possibility of designing a computer that was based exclusively on quantum rules, publishing a breakthrough paper a few months later.

Quantum Theory

Quantum theory's development began in 1900 with a presentation by Max Planck. The presentation was to the German Physical Society, in which Planck introduced the idea that energy and matter exists in individual units. Further developments by a number of scientists over the following thirty years led to the modern understanding of quantum theory.

Quantum Theory

Quantum theory's development began in 1900 with a presentation by Max Planck. The presentation was to the German Physical Society, in which Planck introduced the idea that energy and matter exists in individual units. Further developments by a number of scientists over the following thirty years led to the modern understanding of quantum theory.

The Essential Elements of Quantum Theory:

Further Developments of Quantum Theory

Niels Bohr proposed the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. This theory asserts that a particle is whatever it is measured to be, but that it cannot be assumed to have specific properties, or even to exist, until it is measured. This relates to a principle called superposition. Superposition claims when we do not know what the state of a given object is, it is actually in all possible states simultaneously -- as long as we don't look to check.

To illustrate this theory, we can use the famous analogy of Schrodinger's Cat. First, we have a living cat and place it in a lead box. At this stage, there is no question that the cat is alive. Then throw in a vial of cyanide and seal the box. We do not know if the cat is alive or if it has broken the cyanide capsule and died. Since we do not know, the cat is both alive and dead, according to quantum law -- in a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box and see what condition the cat is in that the superposition is lost, and the cat must be either alive or dead.

The principle that, in some way, one particle can exist in numerous states opens up profound implications for computing.

A Comparison of Classical and Quantum Computing

Classical computing relies on principles expressed by Boolean algebra; usually Operating with a 3 or 7-modelogic gateprinciple. Data must be processed in an exclusive binary state at any point in time; either 0 (off / false) or 1 (on / true). These values are binary digits, or bits. The millions of transistors and capacitors at the heart of computers can only be in one state at any point. In addition, there is still a limit as to how quickly these devices can be made to switch states. As we progress to smaller and faster circuits, we begin to reach the physical limits of materials and the threshold for classical laws of physics to apply.

The quantum computer operates with a two-mode logic gate:XORand a mode called QO1 (the ability to change 0 into a superposition of 0 and 1). In a quantum computer, a number of elemental particles such as electrons or photons can be used. Each particle is given a charge, or polarization, acting as a representation of 0 and/or 1. Each particle is called a quantum bit, or qubit. The nature and behavior of these particles form the basis of quantum computing and quantum supremacy. The two most relevant aspects of quantum physics are the principles of superposition andentanglement.

Superposition

Think of a qubit as an electron in a magnetic field. The electron's spin may be either in alignment with the field, which is known as aspin-upstate, or opposite to the field, which is known as aspin-downstate. Changing the electron's spin from one state to another is achieved by using a pulse of energy, such as from alaser. If only half a unit of laser energy is used, and the particle is isolated the particle from all external influences, the particle then enters a superposition of states. Behaving as if it were in both states simultaneously.

Each qubit utilized could take a superposition of both 0 and 1. Meaning, the number of computations a quantum computer could take is 2^n, where n is the number of qubits used. A quantum computer comprised of 500 qubits would have a potential to do 2^500 calculations in a single step. For reference, 2^500 is infinitely more atoms than there are in the known universe. These particles all interact with each other via quantum entanglement.

In comparison to classical, quantum computing counts as trueparallel processing. Classical computers today still only truly do one thing at a time. In classical computing, there are just two or more processors to constitute parallel processing.EntanglementParticles (like qubits) that have interacted at some point retain a type can be entangled with each other in pairs, in a process known ascorrelation. Knowing the spin state of one entangled particle - up or down -- gives away the spin of the other in the opposite direction. In addition, due to the superposition, the measured particle has no single spin direction before being measured. The spin state of the particle being measured is determined at the time of measurement and communicated to the correlated particle, which simultaneously assumes the opposite spin direction. The reason behind why is not yet explained.

Quantum entanglement allows qubits that are separated by large distances to interact with each other instantaneously (not limited to the speed of light). No matter how great the distance between the correlated particles, they will remain entangled as long as they are isolated.

Taken together, quantum superposition and entanglement create an enormously enhanced computing power. Where a 2-bit register in an ordinary computer can store only one of four binary configurations (00, 01, 10, or 11) at any given time, a 2-qubit register in a quantum computer can store all four numbers simultaneously. This is because each qubit represents two values. If more qubits are added, the increased capacity is expanded exponentially.

Quantum Programming

Quantum computing offers an ability to write programs in a completely new way. For example, a quantum computer could incorporate a programming sequence that would be along the lines of "take all the superpositions of all the prior computations." This would permit extremely fast ways of solving certain mathematical problems, such as factorization of large numbers.

The first quantum computing program appeared in 1994 by Peter Shor, who developed a quantum algorithm that could efficiently factorize large numbers.

The Problems - And Some Solutions

The benefits of quantum computing are promising, but there are huge obstacles to overcome still. Some problems with quantum computing are:

There are many problems to overcome, such as how to handle security and quantum cryptography. Long time quantum information storage has been a problem in the past too. However, breakthroughs in the last 15 years and in the recent past have made some form of quantum computing practical. There is still much debate as to whether this is less than a decade away or a hundred years into the future. However, the potential that this technology offers is attracting tremendous interest from both the government and the private sector. Military applications include the ability to break encryptions keys via brute force searches, while civilian applications range from DNA modeling to complex material science analysis.

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