Category Archives: Quantum Computing

Ramping up the qubits

Julian Kelly/Google

By Matt Reynolds

Google is leading the pack when it comes to quantum computing. The company is testing a 20-qubit processor its most powerful quantum chip yet and is on target to have a working 49-qubit chip by the end of this year.

Qubits, or quantum bits, can be a mixture of 0 and 1 at the same time, making them potentially more powerful than classical bits.

And if everything goes to plan, the 49-qubit chip will make Google the first to build a quantum computer capable of solving certain problems that are beyond the abilities of ordinary computers. Google set itself this ambitious goal, known as quantum supremacy, in a paper published last July.

Alan Ho, an engineer in Googles quantum AI lab, revealed the companys progress at a quantum computing conference in Munich, Germany. His team is currently working with a 20-qubit system that has a two-qubit fidelity of 99.5 per cent a measure of how error-prone the processor is, with a higher rating equating to fewer errors.

For quantum supremacy, Google will need to build a 49-qubit system with a two-qubit fidelity of at least 99.7 per cent. Ho is confident his team will deliver this system by the end of this year. Until now, the companys best public effort was a 9-qubit computer built in 2015.

Things really have moved much quicker than I would have expected, says Simon Devitt at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan. Now that Google and other companies involved in quantum computing have mastered much of the fundamental science behind creating high-quality superconducting qubits, the big challenge facing these firms is scaling these systems and reducing their error rates.

It is important not to get carried away with numbers of qubits, says Michele Reilly, CEO at Turing Inc, a quantum start-up. Its impossible to really harness the power of these machines in a useful way without error correction, she says a technique that mitigates the fickle nature of quantum mechanics.

Ho says it will be 2027 before we have error-corrected quantum computers, so useful devices are still some way off. But if Google can be the first to demonstrate quantum supremacy, showing that qubits really can beat regular computers, it will be a major scientific breakthrough.

Read more: Revealed: Googles plan for quantum computer supremacy

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Google on track for quantum computer breakthrough by end of 2017 - New Scientist

John Martinis, one of Googles quantum computing gurus, laid out Googles stretch goal: to build and test a 49-qubit (quantum bit) quantum computer by the end of 2017. This computer will use qubits made of superconducting circuits. Each qubit is prepared in a precise quantum state based on a two-state system. The test will be a milestone in quantum computer technology. In a subsequent presentation, Sergio Boixo, Martinis colleague at Google, said that a quantum computer with approximately 50 qubits will be capable of certain tasks beyond anything the fastest classical computers can do.

Researchers say that quantum computers promise an exponential increase in speed for a subset of computational chores like prime number factorization or exact simulations of organic molecules. This is because of entanglement: If you prepare entangled qubits, you will be able to manipulate multiple states simultaneously.

New Scientist reports that Google is testing a 20 qubit quantum computer. Alan Ho, an engineer in Googles quantum AI lab, revealed the companys progress at a quantum computing conference in Munich, Germany. His team is currently working with a 20-qubit system that has a two-qubit fidelity of 99.5 per cent a measure of how error-prone the processor is, with a higher rating equating to fewer errors.

For quantum supremacy (Quantum computers faster than current classical comuputers), Google will need to build a 49-qubit system with a two-qubit fidelity of at least 99.7 per cent. Ho is confident his team will deliver this system by the end of this year. Until now, the companys best public effort was a 9-qubit computer built in 2015. A 2014 prototype of a Google qubit (0.6 cm by 0.6 cm) known as a transmon, based on superconducting circuits. Googles quantum computing test will use 49 updated versions of these qubits.

Ho says it will be 2027 before we have error-corrected quantum computers, so useful devices are still some way off. But if Google can be the first to demonstrate quantum supremacy, showing that qubits really can beat regular computers, it will be a major scientific breakthrough.

Read more:

Google on track to make quantum computer faster than classical computers within 7 months - Next Big Future

The Dow Chemical Company (DOW - Free Report) and 1QB Information Technologies (1QBit") entered into a collaborative pact to develop quantum computing tools for the chemicals and materials science technology spaces. Financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed.

Dow Chemicals unique innovation capabilities combined with 1QBits leading expertise in the development of applications for quantum computing will speed up the deployment of quantum computing across a number of applications related to the chemical sector.

The partnership will also enhance Dow Chemicals discovery process by building strong fundamental understanding of new chemicals and materials.

1QBit intends to apply breakthroughs in computation to machine intelligence and optimization science through a broadly accessible, hardware-agnostic software platform. The company has been developing new methods for machine learning, sampling, and optimization for the last four years based on reformulating problems to meet the unique requirements of interfacing with quantum computers and leveraging their capabilities.

With this agreement in place, both the companies plan to develop strong capabilities in the quantum computing space and advance their world-class innovation capabilities.

Dow Chemical has outperformed the Zacks categorized Chemicals-Diversified industry over a year. The companys shares have moved up around 18.7% over this period, compared with roughly 16.8% gain recorded by the industry.

Dow Chemical is witnessing signs of positive economic momentum globally, amid sustained geopolitical risks and volatility. The company is also seeing early signs of gradual improvements in consumer-led markets in Latin America. The company believes that the strength of its portfolio along with its focus on consumer-led markets will continue to bode well.

The company is expected to gain from productivity management actions as well as focus on consumer-led markets. Dow Chemical should also benefit from cost synergies associated with Dow Corning Silicones business and its strategic investments in the U.S. Gulf Coast and the Middle East. The planned merger with DuPont (DD - Free Report) is also expected to create significant synergies.

However, Dow Chemicals agriculture business remains affected by weak crop commodity prices and depressed demand in North America. The company also faces feedstock cost pressure and headwinds associated with higher start-up and maintenance costs.

Dow Chemical Company (The) Price and Consensus

Zacks Rank & Stocks to Consider

Dow Chemical currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Some top-ranked stocks in the chemical space include BASF SE (BASFY - Free Report) and The Chemours Company (CC - Free Report) . Both the companies sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

BASF has expected long-term growth of 8.9%.

Chemours has expected long-term growth of 15.5%.

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Dow Chemical, 1QBit Ink Quantum Computing Development Deal - Zacks.com

Few people can say theyve brought about a quantum leap in their field. But if all goes well for Chad Rigetti, this summer he will join them, by making the machine on your desk as obsolete as an abacus.

Were on a mission to build the worlds most powerful computer, says Rigetti, to solve humanitys most pressing problems. Cancer, climate change, world hunger all targets of the technology Rigetti has in mind. Its a striking vision for a 38-year-old farm boy from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, who once thought he would grow barley after high school.

To achieve his goal creating the first commercial quantum computer would amount to a revolution in computing. Conventional computers reduce logic problems to math problems, and math problems to a binary counting system: On or off equals one or zero. The time required to solve difficult problems has been getting shorter and shorter as computer engineers figure out how to make their on/off switches smaller, each year doubling the computing power contained within the same-size box. They now envision the day when theyre working on switches the size of atoms.

But thats also the point at which theyll hit a barrier, because subatomic particles behave according to the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics. A single particle can be in two places at once. It can instantly affect another particle light-years away. And it can travel through insulation, so its hard to find when you need it.

After more or less blundering into a physics class, Rigetti found himself lured by the mystery of quantum mechanics.

Such unpredictable behavior makes particles such as photons and electrons difficult to control but it also gives them a kind of superpower. Instead of bits, a quantum computer uses qubits, which can be both on and off at the same time. A conventional processor does one calculation at a time. A quantum processor with one qubit can do two calculations at once. A two-qubit processor can do four, and so on. A 70-qubit processor would be more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer ever built, and a 100-qubit processor would be more powerful than a conventional computer the size of the universe.

Why does this matter? On a grand scale, quantum computers could make quantum mechanics more intuitive, perhaps triggering a shift in human understanding similar to the discovery that the Earth orbits the sun. More practically, they could solve complex problems involving the interactions of multiple variables, enabling them, say, to dramatically accelerate the pattern recognition essential to artificial intelligence. They could also model how molecules interact to create new drugs or they might develop a fertilizer that sucks greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

That last example comes readily to Rigetti, who operated a tractor as a teenager. But if youd asked his high school teachers whether they thought him likely to innovate in the field of agriculture, let alone climate change, the response might have been a collective no. He probably stood out as being a bit argumentative, says his mother. I credit that to the fact that he was curious, and he was challenging the teachers.

That very combination of combativeness and curiosity propelled Rigetti to where he is today. Rather than academics, Rigetti threw himself into sports, attracting the attention of the wrestling coach at the University of Regina. Once there, however, a torn ligament halted his athletic career and curiosity took over.

After more or less blundering into a physics class, Rigetti found himself lured by the mystery of quantum mechanics and he brought a wrestlers tenacity to the thorniest equations. Eventually his efforts led him to Yale, where he teamed with Michel Devoret, an applied physicist with ideas for grappling with subatomic particles. Devoret proposed refrigerating silicon chips to colder than outer space, a temperature at which they become superconducting. Materials that are superconducting still behave in quantum ways, but their larger size makes it possible to manipulate them far more easily than individual photons and electrons.

Rigetti saw ways to build this idea into an actual quantum computer. From Yale, he took it to IBM, before founding his startup in 2013. Sitting for an interview in a conference room at Rigetti Computing in Berkeley, California, Rigetti sports the requisite Silicon Valleycasual attire: down vest over a pin-striped shirt, and blue sneakers. The newly minted entrepreneur is also newly married, to Susan Fowler, the former Uber engineer whose blog post about sexual harassment at the company was a key factor in forcing its CEO, Travis Kalanick, to take a leave of absence. But while Rigetti may appear nonchalant, hes anything but laid-back. He is obsessively punctual, runs a meticulously clean laboratory and tightly limits whats disclosed about the companys technology.

Secretive is the word that Daniel Lidar, a quantum computing expert at the University of Southern California, chooses to describe Rigetti. He has revealed few specifics about the innovations that distinguish his companys product from those of his competitors, Lidar points out. And the competition is formidable. IBM, Google, Microsoft and Chinese tech giant Alibaba are all racing to invent the first general purpose commercial quantum computer.

What makes Rigetti think he can slay these Goliaths? Its like GM versus Tesla, Rigetti says. You can do amazing things by building an organization from scratch. That narrative has so far convinced venture capitalists to lay out $69.2 million, enabling the company to open offices in Berkeley and Fremont, California, and hire physicists from top universities and leading tech companies.

I know people who work there, says Seth Lloyd, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, who devised part of the theoretical framework for quantum computing. I dont know if theyre going to win this race, but they are certainly real competitors in it.

When Rigetti Computing launches its computer the company promises an announcement this summer experts such as Lloyd and Lidar have math problems ready to challenge it. If the quantum computer solves them faster than a conventional computer, a new era may be at hand for all of humanity. If not, the world still needs barley.

Read the original:

Can This Quantum-Computing Genius Beat Out IBM and Google? - OZY

June 19, 2017 by Larry Hardesty A micrograph of the MIT researchers new device, with a visualization of electrical-energy measurements and a schematic of the device layout superimposed on it. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ordinarily, light particlesphotonsdon't interact. If two photons collide in a vacuum, they simply pass through each other.

An efficient way to make photons interact could open new prospects for both classical optics and quantum computing, an experimental technology that promises large speedups on some types of calculations.

In recent years, physicists have enabled photon-photon interactions using atoms of rare elements cooled to very low temperatures.

But in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters, MIT researchers describe a new technique for enabling photon-photon interactions at room temperature, using a silicon crystal with distinctive patterns etched into it. In physics jargon, the crystal introduces "nonlinearities" into the transmission of an optical signal.

"All of these approaches that had atoms or atom-like particles require low temperatures and work over a narrow frequency band," says Dirk Englund, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and senior author on the new paper. "It's been a holy grail to come up with methods to realize single-photon-level nonlinearities at room temperature under ambient conditions."

Joining Englund on the paper are Hyeongrak Choi, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, and Mikkel Heuck, who was a postdoc in Englund's lab when the work was done and is now at the Technical University of Denmark.

Photonic independence

Quantum computers harness a strange physical property called "superposition," in which a quantum particle can be said to inhabit two contradictory states at the same time. The spin, or magnetic orientation, of an electron, for instance, could be both up and down at the same time; the polarization of a photon could be both vertical and horizontal.

If a string of quantum bitsor qubits, the quantum analog of the bits in a classical computeris in superposition, it can, in some sense, canvass multiple solutions to the same problem simultaneously, which is why quantum computers promise speedups.

Most experimental qubits use ions trapped in oscillating magnetic fields, superconducting circuits, orlike Englund's own researchdefects in the crystal structure of diamonds. With all these technologies, however, superpositions are difficult to maintain.

Because photons aren't very susceptible to interactions with the environment, they're great at maintaining superposition; but for the same reason, they're difficult to control. And quantum computing depends on the ability to send control signals to the qubits.

That's where the MIT researchers' new work comes in. If a single photon enters their device, it will pass through unimpeded. But if two photonsin the right quantum statestry to enter the device, they'll be reflected back.

The quantum state of one of the photons can thus be thought of as controlling the quantum state of the other. And quantum information theory has established that simple quantum "gates" of this type are all that is necessary to build a universal quantum computer.

Unsympathetic resonance

The researchers' device consists of a long, narrow, rectangular silicon crystal with regularly spaced holes etched into it. The holes are widest at the ends of the rectangle, and they narrow toward its center. Connecting the two middle holes is an even narrower channel, and at its center, on opposite sides, are two sharp concentric tips. The pattern of holes temporarily traps light in the device, and the concentric tips concentrate the electric field of the trapped light.

The researchers prototyped the device and showed that it both confined light and concentrated the light's electric field to the degree predicted by their theoretical models. But turning the device into a quantum gate would require another component, a dielectric sandwiched between the tips. (A dielectric is a material that is ordinarily electrically insulating but will become polarizedall its positive and negative charges will align in the same directionwhen exposed to an electric field.)

When a light wave passes close to a dielectric, its electric field will slightly displace the electrons of the dielectric's atoms. When the electrons spring back, they wobble, like a child's swing when it's pushed too hard. This is the nonlinearity that the researchers' system exploits.

The size and spacing of the holes in the device are tailored to a specific light frequencythe device's "resonance frequency." But the nonlinear wobbling of the dielectric's electrons should shift that frequency.

Ordinarily, that shift is mild enough to be negligible. But because the sharp tips in the researchers' device concentrate the electric fields of entering photons, they also exaggerate the shift. A single photon could still get through the device. But if two photons attempted to enter it, the shift would be so dramatic that they'd be repulsed.

Practical potential

The device can be configured so that the dramatic shift in resonance frequency occurs only if the photons attempting to enter it have particular quantum propertiesspecific combinations of polarization or phase, for instance. The quantum state of one photon could thus determine the way in which the other photon is handled, the basic requirement for a quantum gate.

Englund emphasizes that the new research will not yield a working quantum computer in the immediate future. Too often, light entering the prototype is still either scattered or absorbed, and the quantum states of the photons can become slightly distorted. But other applications may be more feasible in the near term. For instance, a version of the device could provide a reliable source of single photons, which would greatly abet a range of research in quantum information science and communications.

"This work is quite remarkable and unique because it shows strong light-matter interaction, localization of light, and relatively long-time storage of photons at such a tiny scale in a semiconductor," says Mohammad Soltani, a nanophotonics researcher in Raytheon BBN Technologies' Quantum Information Processing Group. "It can enable things that were questionable before, like nonlinear single-photon gates for quantum information. It works at room temperature, it's solid-state, and it's compatible with semiconductor manufacturing. This work is among the most promising to date for practical devices, such as quantum information devices."

Explore further: Unpolarized single-photon generation with true randomness from diamond

More information: Hyeongrak Choi et al. Self-Similar Nanocavity Design with Ultrasmall Mode Volume for Single-Photon Nonlinearities, Physical Review Letters (2017). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.223605

This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching.

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Great advance but very confusing title. With this technique Photons do not interact between them , each one only interacts with the material.

Okay, right away, I don't understand the concept of photons that "simply pass through each other." It would make way more sense if photons "simply" bounce off each other and fly the opposite way, if colliding in a vacuum. They're already going the speed of light, so there's no elasticity. Please, show me the evidence and research!

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Original post:

Prototype device enables photon-photon interactions at room temperature for quantum computing - Phys.Org

Tech

19:29 19.06.2017 Get short URL

The Universitysays the US$2.13 million system, tobe developed atits Quantum Information Science Center laboratory, will use single photons asthe communications medium quantum bits make it possible toperform calculations innew ways that are not possible incurrent communications systems or even supercomputers.

Current methods ofencrypting data are increasingly vulnerable toattacks, asthe increased power ofquantum computing comes online.

Quantum communication systems use the laws ofphysics tosecure data and are therefore resistant toattacks.

Professor Nadav Katz, Director ofthe Quantum Information Science Center, said the project would position Israel inthe "leading edge" ofresearch towardultimately secured communication systems. While a fresh tender, the center was originally founded in2013, and recruited an interdisciplinary team ofover 20 researchers fromphysics, computer science, mathematics, chemistry, philosophy and engineering toits ranks.

However, the privacy conscious and techies alike may be disappointed inthe project's objectives rather thanfocusing onprotecting individual data, the system will instead be designed tobeef upthe government's quantum communications capabilities, and give Israeli officials the ability toprotect themselves againsthackers and other potentially malicious forces.

Quantum information research is one ofthe biggest growth areas in21st century science, promising dramatic improvements incomputation speed and secure communication. Based onthe inherent wave-like nature ofmatter and light, it will theoretically lead tomassive leaps forward inhuman ability tofabricate, control, measure and understand advanced structures.

Competition inthe field is rapidly gathering pace, withChina inJune showing offthe results ofits first Earth-to-satellite quantum entanglement experimentlast week, using the Micius satellite launched in2016. The satellite is said tohave "teleportation-like" communication capabilities, which cannot be hacked.

Meanwhile, back onEarth, the best-developed quantum communications application is quantum key distribution companies such asQuintessenceLabs and ID Quantique exploit the quantum properties ofphotons toprotect encryption keys generated bytheir appliances, beforeusing the keys toencrypt data transmitted overconventional channels.

As such, it is inevitable governments will be the first toget their hands onmost quantum technology whether communications or computers.

The cost involved inresearch and development cannot be borne byprivate businesses, much less individuals and ontop ofboasting the requisite funds forthe task, governments would also be granted a head start indigital spying and surveillance.

Quantum computers will be most effective atbreaking encryption, due totheir hyperactive number crunching capabilities and given governmental dedication toending encryption, most notably inthe UK,there's no doubt the technology is being doggedly pursued precisely forthis reason.

The obvious upshot ofthis would be that governments would be able toheavily insulate their own data fromoutsiders, while throwing open the vast majority ofpublic data totheir own scrutiny.

What's more, it's evident fromtheNSA's XKeyscore program, asrevealed byEdward Snowden,that Western spying agencies are storing vast quantities ofencrypted data they cannot currently crack, inthe hope once a requisitely powerful quantum computer actually exists, it can retrospectively break intothose communications.

Past, current and future data may not be safe fromprying official eyes formuch longer.

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Israel Enters Quantum Computer Race, Placing Encryption at Ever-Greater Risk - Sputnik International

If you're not ready to start using quantum computing in your enterprise, you should at least be planning how to do so.

Researchers say companies may be less than five to 10 years away from turning to quantum computing to solve big business problems.

David Schatsky, managing director, Deloitte LLP

"Quantum computing has the potential to not just do things faster but to allow companies to do things entirely differently," said David Schatsky, managing director of Deloitte LLP, a global consulting and financial advisory company. "If they have certain analytical workloads that could take them weeks to run and they could do it almost instantaneously, how would that change the way they make decisions, or the risks they're willing to take or what products and services they can offer customers?"

That means corporate execs and IT heads should be thinking now about the strategic and operational implications of having quantum computers in their tech toolbox.

There is much buzz around quantum computers because they are expected to surpass even the most powerful classic supercomputers in certain calculations -- especially handling problems that involve sifting through massive amounts of data. Quantum computers, for example, might be able to find distant habitable planets, the cure for cancer and Alzheimer's disease or revamp complex airline flight schedules.

Quantum machines offer a different kind of computing power because instead of relying on ones and zeros - or bits - they use qubits, which can be both ones and zeros.

One of the rules of quantum mechanics is that a quantum system can be in more than one state at the same time, meaning it's not known what a qubit is until it begins to interact with -- or entangle -- other qubits. Unlike classic computers that operate in a linear or orderly fashion, quantum computers gain their power from qubits working with each other, allowing them to calculate all possibilities at the same time, instead of one by one.

"It's an incredibly promising new paradigm in computing," said William Martin, a math professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass. "We have examples of things a quantum computer can do that we don't know how to do with a normal computer. It's going to be a game-changing phenomenon, if we can actually build it."

WPI professor William Martin

In a report released late last month, Deloitte noted that quantum computing is close to realizing its promise and having an enormous impact on fields from healthcare to pharmaceuticals, space exploration and manufacturing. As researchers continue work on building powerful, fully functional quantum machines, interest is growing.

The field has attracted $147 million in venture capital in the last three years and $2.2 billion in government funding globally, according to Deloitte.

A little over a year ago, the European Commission announced a $1.13 billion project to develop quantum technologies over the next decade. And the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced last month that it is working to build a quantum computer in the next several years.

The U.S. is considered to be a major investor in quantum computing research, as well as home to quantum-focused companies like IBM, Google and Microsoft. . Google, for instance, is working on quantum processes it can make available to companies over the cloud, while Microsoft said last fall it was ready to go from "research to engineering with its quantum work."

There also are quantum computing startups like Rigetti Computing, 1Qbit, and Cambridge Quantum Computing, that are getting a lot of attention.

They're not all building a large quantum computer. Some are working on software, while others focus on hardware components or quantum-resistant cryptography.

One company now building what its executives say is the first quantum computer is D-Wave Systems, based in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Although many question whether it's a true quantum computer, D-Wave's system is still being tested by the likes of NASA, Google, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lockheed Martin. That level of interest in testing the D-Wave system - whether it's a true quantum computer or not -- shows how high expectations have gotten around this technology.

Rupak Biswas, director of exploration technology at NASA Ames Research Center, said he oversees 700 employees -- 10 to 12 of whom are now working on quantum computing. Those efforts include testing the D-Wave system.

About $3 million of the agency's research-and-development budget goes to quantum computing.

While NASA is not yet trying to solve real problems - like massive air traffic management issues or scheduling astronaut time on the International Space Station - scientists there are working to figure out the best way to use a quantum computer and understand the underlying physics, as well as the programming that will be needed for it.

Even if the D-Wave system is better at computational-heavy calculations, it's not big enough to handle real problems for NASA. Something that large could be five to 10 years away, Biswas said.

In addition to testing the D-Wave system, NASA is also working with U.C. Berkeley, Google, U.C. Santa Barbara, Rigetti Computing, and Sandia National Labs - all of which are doing quantum research.

"Our focus is how do we use available technology to accelerate our main mission," said Biswas. "Quantum computing is an enabling technology. We're looking now at what it will let us do."

That plan follows the advice Deloitte's Schatsky is giving to large enterprises.

"I'd expect to see some meaningful commercial use in the next 10 years," said Schatsky. "We're not saying that companies will be buying quantum computers in the next 'n' years, but this is a real phenomenon that is progressing rapidly.... Companies should pay attention and should start to think about the strategic and operational implications of having this.

"I don't think it's worth a huge amount of time in the C-suite, but if [a company] is innovative and forward looking, they should be tracking this phenomenon, and if they have an R&D budget, they should allocate a slice of it to this domain," said Schatsky, noting that some banks have invested a few million dollars in quantum R&D. "I think interest is going to grow."

Dario Gil, vice president of Science and Solutions at IBM Research, has been working on quantum computing there for the last five years, though the company itself has been researching it since the 1970s.

A year ago, IBM announced it not only had a 5-qubit processor but was making it available to customers in the cloud.

According to Gil, IBM has had about 45,000 universities and companies running more than 300,000 experiments on the cloud-based quantum system. Those efforts are not designed to solve production problems but to learn how to work with a quantum machine.

"I absolutely agree that now is the right time to start thinking about quantum," said Gil. "Companies already are and they are engaging very seriously on this topic. I think quantum, for any serious company that relies on computing for their business, can't just be something that is out there on the horizon. At least one person in your organization should be thinking about what is this and what does it mean for this organization?"

He added that IBM is focused on trying to make quantum machines that can be, or routinely are, used on real-world problems in the enterprise within the next three to five years.

"We're already in that window of quantum emerging as a technology that has commercial value," said Gil. "If you were thinking about the web in the early 1990s or mobile in the early 2000s, this is analogous. Nobody would look back and say, 'I wish I had slowed down in my thinking about those technolgies. You have to start understanding about what it is and what it can do."

See the original post here:

Its time to decide how quantum computing will help your ...

Ordinarily, light particles photons dont interact. If two photons collide in a vacuum, they simply pass through each other.

An efficient way to make photons interact could open new prospects for both classical optics and quantum computing, an experimental technology that promises large speedups on some types of calculations.

In recent years, physicists have enabled photon-photon interactions using atoms of rare elements cooled to very low temperatures.

But in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters, MIT researchers describe a new technique for enabling photon-photon interactions at room temperature, using a silicon crystal with distinctive patterns etched into it. In physics jargon, the crystal introduces nonlinearities into the transmission of an optical signal.

All of these approaches that had atoms or atom-like particles require low temperatures and work over a narrow frequency band, says Dirk Englund, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and senior author on the new paper. Its been a holy grail to come up with methods to realize single-photon-level nonlinearities at room temperature under ambient conditions.

Joining Englund on the paper are Hyeongrak Choi, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, and Mikkel Heuck, who was a postdoc in Englunds lab when the work was done and is now at the Technical University of Denmark.

Photonic independence

Quantum computers harness a strange physical property called superposition, in which a quantum particle can be said to inhabit two contradictory states at the same time. The spin, or magnetic orientation, of an electron, for instance, could be both up and down at the same time; the polarization of a photon could be both vertical and horizontal.

If a string of quantum bits or qubits, the quantum analog of the bits in a classical computer is in superposition, it can, in some sense, canvass multiple solutions to the same problem simultaneously, which is why quantum computers promise speedups.

Most experimental qubits use ions trapped in oscillating magnetic fields, superconducting circuits, or like Englunds own research defects in the crystal structure of diamonds. With all these technologies, however, superpositions are difficult to maintain.

Because photons arent very susceptible to interactions with the environment, theyre great at maintaining superposition; but for the same reason, theyre difficult to control. And quantum computing depends on the ability to send control signals to the qubits.

Thats where the MIT researchers new work comes in. If a single photon enters their device, it will pass through unimpeded. But if two photons in the right quantum states try to enter the device, theyll be reflected back.

The quantum state of one of the photons can thus be thought of as controlling the quantum state of the other. And quantum information theory has established that simple quantum gates of this type are all that is necessary to build a universal quantum computer.

Unsympathetic resonance

The researchers device consists of a long, narrow, rectangular silicon crystal with regularly spaced holes etched into it. The holes are widest at the ends of the rectangle, and they narrow toward its center. Connecting the two middle holes is an even narrower channel, and at its center, on opposite sides, are two sharp concentric tips. The pattern of holes temporarily traps light in the device, and the concentric tips concentrate the electric field of the trapped light.

The researchers prototyped the device and showed that it both confined light and concentrated the lights electric field to the degree predicted by their theoretical models. But turning the device into a quantum gate would require another component, a dielectric sandwiched between the tips. (A dielectric is a material that is ordinarily electrically insulating but will become polarized all its positive and negative charges will align in the same direction when exposed to an electric field.)

When a light wave passes close to a dielectric, its electric field will slightly displace the electrons of the dielectrics atoms. When the electrons spring back, they wobble, like a childs swing when its pushed too hard. This is the nonlinearity that the researchers system exploits.

The size and spacing of the holes in the device are tailored to a specific light frequency the devices resonance frequency. But the nonlinear wobbling of the dielectrics electrons should shift that frequency.

Ordinarily, that shift is mild enough to be negligible. But because the sharp tips in the researchers device concentrate the electric fields of entering photons, they also exaggerate the shift. A single photon could still get through the device. But if two photons attempted to enter it, the shift would be so dramatic that theyd be repulsed.

Practical potential

The device can be configured so that the dramatic shift in resonance frequency occurs only if the photons attempting to enter it have particular quantum properties specific combinations of polarization or phase, for instance. The quantum state of one photon could thus determine the way in which the other photon is handled, the basic requirement for a quantum gate.

Englund emphasizes that the new research will not yield a working quantum computer in the immediate future. Too often, light entering the prototype is still either scattered or absorbed, and the quantum states of the photons can become slightly distorted. But other applications may be more feasible in the near term. For instance, a version of the device could provide a reliable source of single photons, which would greatly abet a range of research in quantum information science and communications.

This work is quite remarkable and unique because it shows strong light-matter interaction, localization of light, and relatively long-time storage of photons at such a tiny scale in a semiconductor, says Mohammad Soltani, a nanophotonics researcher in Raytheon BBN Technologies Quantum Information Processing Group. It can enable things that were questionable before, like nonlinear single-photon gates for quantum information. It works at room temperature, its solid-state, and its compatible with semiconductor manufacturing. This work is among the most promising to date for practical devices, such as quantum information devices.

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Toward optical quantum computing - MIT News

NEW YORK It is a sunny Tuesday morning in late March at IBMs Thomas J. Watson Research Center. The corridor from the reception area follows the long, curving glass curtain-wall that looks out over the visitors parking lot to leafless trees covering a distant hill in Yorktown Heights, New York, an hour north of Manhattan. Walk past the podium from the Jeopardy! episodes at which IBMs Watson smote the human champion of the TV quiz show, turn right into a hallway, and you will enter a windowless lab where a quantum computer is chirping away.

Actually, chirp isnt quite the right word. It is a somewhat metallic sound, chush chush chush, that is made by the equipment that lowers the temperature inside a so-called dilution refrigerator to within hailing distance of absolute zero. Encapsulated in a white canister suspended from a frame, the dilution refrigerator cools a superconducting chip studded with a handful of quantum bits, or qubits.

Quantum computing has been around, in theory if not in practice, for several decades. But these new types of machines, designed to harness quantum mechanics and potentially process unimaginable amounts of data, are certifiably a big deal. I would argue that a working quantum computer is perhaps the most sophisticated technology that humans have ever built, said Chad Rigetti, founder and chief executive officer of Rigetti Computing, a startup in Berkeley, Calif. Quantum computers, he says, harness nature at a level we became aware of only about 100 years ago one that isnt apparent to us in everyday life.

What is more, the potential of quantum computing is enormous. Tapping into the weird way nature works could potentially speed up computing so some problems that are now intractable to classical computers could finally yield solutions. And maybe not just for chemistry and materials science. With practical breakthroughs in speed on the horizon, Wall Streets antennae are twitching.

The second investment that CME Group Inc.s venture arm ever made was in 1QB Information Technologies Inc., a quantum-computing software company in Vancouver. From the start at CME Ventures, weve been looking further ahead at transformational innovations and technologies that we think could have an impact on the financial-services industry in the future, said Rumi Morales, head of CME Ventures LLC.

That 1QBit financing round, in 2015, was led by Royal Bank of Scotland. Kevin Hanley, RBSs director of innovation, says quantum computing is likely to have the biggest impact on industries that are data-rich and time-sensitive. We think financial services is kind of in the cross hairs of that profile, he said.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is an investor in D-Wave Systems Inc., another quantum player, as is In-Q-Tel, the CIA-backed venture capital company, says Vern Brownell, CEO of D-Wave. The British Columbia-based company makes machines that do something called quantum annealing. Quantum annealing is basically using the quantum computer to solve optimization problems at the lowest level, Brownell said. Weve taken a slightly different approach where were actually trying to engage with customers, make our computers more and more powerful, and provide this advantage to them in the form of a programmable, usable computer.

Marcos Lopez de Prado, a senior managing director at Guggenheim Partners LLC who is also a scientific adviser at 1QBit and a research fellow at the U.S. Department of Energys Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, says it is all about context. The reason quantum computing is so exciting is its perfect marriage with machine learning, he said. I would go as far as to say that currently this is the main application for quantum computing.

Part of that simply derives from the idea of a quantum computer; harnessing a physical device to find an answer, Lopez de Prado says. He sometimes explains it by pointing to the video game Angry Birds. When you play it on your iPad, the central processing units use some mathematical equations that have been programmed into a library to simulate the effects of gravity and the interaction of objects bouncing and colliding. This is how digital computers work, he said.

By contrast, quantum computers turn that approach on its head, Lopez de Prado says. The paradigm for quantum computers is to throw some birds and see what happens. Encode into the quantum microchip this problem; these are your birds and where you throw them from, so whats the optimal trajectory? Then you let the computer check all possible solutions essentially or a very large combination of them and come back with an answer, he said. In a quantum computer, there is no mathematician cracking the problem, he said. The laws of physics crack the problem for you.

The fundamental building blocks of our world are quantum mechanical. If you look at a molecule, said Dario Gil, vice president for science and solutions at IBM Research, the reason molecules form and are stable is because of the interactions of these electron orbitals. Each calculation in there each orbital is a quantum mechanical calculation. The number of those calculations, in turn, increases exponentially with the number of electrons youre trying to model. By the time you have 50 electrons, you have 2 to the 50th power calculations, Gil said. Thats a phenomenally large number, so we cant compute it today, he said. (For the record, it is 1.125 quadrillion. So if you fired up your laptop and started cranking through several calculations a second, it would take a few million years to run through them all.) Connecting information theory to physics could provide a path to solving such problems, Gil says. A 50-qubit quantum computer might begin to be able to do it.

Landon Downs, president and co-founder of 1QBit, says it is now becoming possible to unlock the computational power of the quantum world. This has huge implications for producing new materials or creating new drugs, because we can actually move from a paradigm of discovery to a new era of quantum design, he said in an email. Rigetti, whose company is building hybrid quantum-classical machines, says one moonshot use of quantum computing could be to model catalysts that remove carbon and nitrogen from the atmosphere and thereby help fix global warming.

The quantum-computing community hums with activity and excitement these days. Teams around the world at startups, corporations, universities, and government labs are racing to build machines using a welter of different approaches to process quantum information. Superconducting qubit chips too elementary for you? How about trapped ions, which have brought together researchers from the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology? Or maybe the topological approach that Microsoft Corp. is developing through an international effort called Station Q? The aim is to harness a particle called a non-abelian anyon which has not yet been definitively proven to exist.

These are early days, to be sure. As of late May, the number of quantum computers in the world that clearly, unequivocally do something faster or better than a classical computer remains zero, according to Scott Aaronson, a professor of computer science and director of the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Such a signal event would establish quantum supremacy. In Aaronsons words, That we dont have yet.

Yet someone may accomplish the feat as soon as this year. Most insiders say one clear favorite is a group at Google Inc. led by John Martinis, a physics professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. According to Martinis, the groups goal is to achieve supremacy with a 49-qubit chip. As of late May, he says, the team was testing a 22-qubit processor as an intermediate step toward a showdown with a classical supercomputer. We are optimistic about this, since prior chips have worked well, he said in an email.

The idea of using quantum mechanics to process information dates back decades. One key event happened in 1981, when International Business Machines Corp. and MIT co-sponsored a conference on the physics of computation at the universitys Endicott House in Dedham, Massachusetts. At the conference, Richard Feynman, the famed physicist, proposed building a quantum computer. Nature isnt classical, damn it, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, youd better make it quantum mechanical, he said in his talk. And by golly, its a wonderful problem, because it doesnt look so easy.

He got that part right. The basic idea is to take advantage of a couple of the weird properties of the atomic realm superposition and entanglement. Superposition is the mind-bending observation that a particle can be in two states at the same time. Bring out your ruler to get a measurement, however, and the particle will collapse into one state or the other. And you wont know which until you try, except in terms of probabilities. This effect is what underlies Schrodingers cat, the thought-experiment animal that is both alive and dead in a box until you sneak a peek.

Sure, bending your brain around that one doesnt come especially easy; nothing in everyday life works that way, of course. Yet about 1 million experiments since the early 20th century show that superposition is a thing. And if superposition happens to be your thing, the next step is figuring out how to strap such a crazy concept into a harness.

Enter qubits. Classical bits can be a 0 or a 1; run a string of them together through logic gates (AND, OR, NOT, etc.), and you will multiply numbers, draw an image, and whatnot. A qubit, by contrast, can be a 0, a 1, or both at the same time.

Ready for entanglement? (You are in good company if you balk; Albert Einstein famously rebelled against the idea, calling it spooky action at a distance.) Well, lets say two qubits were to get entangled. Gil says that would make them perfectly correlated. A quantum computer could then utilize a menagerie of distinctive logic gates. The so-called Hadamard gate, for example, puts a qubit into a state of perfect superposition. (There may be something called a square root of NOT gate, but lets take a pass on that one.) If you tap the superposition and entanglement in clever arrangements of the weird quantum gates, you start to get at the potential power of quantum computing.

If you have two qubits, you can explore four states; 00, 01, 10, and 11. (Note that thats 4:2 raised to the power of 2.) When I perform a logical operation on my quantum computer, I can operate on all of this at once, Gil said. And the number of states you can look at is 2 raised to the power of the number of qubits. So if you could make a 50-qubit universal quantum computer, you could in theory explore all of those 1.125 quadrillion states at the same time.

What gives quantum computing its special advantage, says Aaronson, of the University of Texas, is that quantum mechanics is based on things called amplitudes. Amplitudes are sort of like probabilities, but they can also be negative in fact, they can also be complex numbers, he said. So if you want to know the probability that something will happen, you add up the amplitudes for all the different ways that it can happen, he says.

The idea with a quantum computation is that you try to choreograph a pattern of interference so that for each wrong answer to your problem, some paths leading there have positive amplitudes and some have negative amplitudes, so they cancel each other out, Aaronson said. Whereas the paths leading to the right answer all have amplitudes that are in phase with each other. The tricky part is that you have to arrange everything not knowing in advance which answer is the right one. So I would say its the exponentiality of quantum states combined with this potential for interference between positive and negative amplitudes thats really the source of the power of quantum computing, he said.

Did we mention that there are problems that a classical computer cant solve? You probably harness one such difficulty every day when you use encryption on the internet. The problem is that it is not easy to find the prime factors of a large number. To review, the prime factors of 15 are 5 and 3. That is easy. If the number you are trying to factor has, say, 200 digits, it is very hard. Even with your laptop running an excellent algorithm, you might have to wait years to find the prime factors.

That brings us to another milestone in quantum computing Shors algorithm. Published in 1994 by Peter Shor, now a math professor at MIT, the algorithm demonstrated an approach that you could use to find the factors of a big number if you had a quantum computer, which didnt exist at the time. Essentially, Shors algorithm would perform some operations that would point to the regions of numbers in which the answer was most likely to be found.

The following year, Shor also discovered a way to perform quantum error correction. Then people really got the idea that, wow, this is a different way of computing things and is more powerful in certain test cases, said Robert Schoelkopf, director of the Yale Quantum Institute and Sterling professor of applied physics and physics. Then there was a big upswell of interest from the physics community to figure out how you could make quantum bits and logic gates between quantum bits and all of those things.

Two decades later, those things are here.

Originally posted here:

Quantum computing, the machines of tomorrow - The Japan Times

http://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/285249/machine-learning-and-big-data-j-p-morgan/

40 years ago a personal computer cost around $500k in todays money and was accessible only to large corporations. Today, as the clich goes, that kind of processing power is available to most people in an affordable mobile phone. Quantum computing, however, is a different matter. Quantum computers are stuck in the 1950s: there arent many of them, they cost tens of millions of dollars, and they take up entire rooms.

One of todays very rare and very costly quantum machines is being developed by D-Wave Systems Inc., a company whose CEO happens to be Vern Brownell, a former CTO of Goldman Sachs. Goldman is one of several lead investors in D-Wave, which its described as having a head start in the field. While most quantum computing rivals are still in their infancy, D-Wave has already been using its system for machine learning. Competitors are eyeing the same plot: 1QB Information Technology Systems Inc (1QBit), a Vancouver-based quantum computing, counts derivatives exchange CME Group among its investors. An RBS banker who led 1QBits 2015 finance round toldBloombergquantum computing is perfect for the data-rich time-sensitive world of financial markets.

Interestingly, therefore, an opportunity has arisen to write machine learning algorithms for quantum computers and then implement them using D-Wave 2000Q, the companys first commercially available quantum computer. Training on the system will be made available too.

The quantum machine learning program is being run by the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), a seed funding program for science-based companies based in Toronto. Last month, it invited applications for 40 places on an initiative intended to develop and sponsor a wave of quantum machine learning start-ups. The next (and last) round of applications closes on Monday July 24th.

Daniel Mulet, associate director of machine learning at CDL says theyve already received 42 applications, around 10% of which are biased towards financial services. Some are very early stage and have been submitted by students, but others are companies that have already been launched, says Mulet. - Theres one thats working with a hedge fund looking for patterns with trading data.

Traditional computers use binary code to solve problems: a bit can be a 1 or a 0. Quantum computers use qubits: a bit can be a 1 or a 0 or a 1 AND a 0 As Bloomberg points out, therefore, if you have two qubits you can have four potential states: 00, 01, 10, and 11. Moreover, the number of states a quantum computer can take into consideration is2 raised to the power of the number of qubits: if you had a 50-qubit universal quantum computer, you could explore1.125 quadrillion states simultaneously.

Quantum computers are able to process much larger quantities of data much faster, says Mulet. Its our belief that these new quantum hardware platforms built by D-Wave or IQB will be used for various machine learning applications in the next few years. When that happens, we want to be ready to leverage that. One day all Bloomberg terminals will be run on quantum computers.

Its not hard to see why Goldman is interested.

If youre interested too and want to apply, you have 39 days to polish your application. As a further lure to candidates, those selected will be mentored by the likes of William Tunstall-Pedoe, a Cambridge AI entrepreneur, and Barney Pell, chief strategy officer at San Francisco-based Loco-Mobi (which is applying AI to parking your car).Those graduating from the program, which begins in September, will receive $80k in funding in return for 8% of the equity in their company.

Mulet says ideal applicants will have a Masters or PhD in a quantitative subject, and be proficient in programming in Python and the use of Tensor Flow, Googles open source library for machine learning.

Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

Photo credit:Quantum foambyAlex Sukontsevis licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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How to get ahead in quantum machine learning AND attract Goldman Sachs - eFinancialCareers