Category Archives: Quantum Computing

In May 1981, at a conference center housed in a chateau-style mansion outside Boston, a few dozen physicists and computer scientists gathered for a three-day meeting. The assembled brainpower was formidable: One attendee, Caltechs Richard Feynman, was already a Nobel laureate and would earn a widespread reputation for genius when his 1985 memoir Surely Youre Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character became a bestseller. Numerous others, such as Paul Benioff, Arthur Burks, Freeman Dyson, Edward Fredkin, Rolf Landauer, John Wheeler, and Konrad Zuse, were among the most accomplished figures in their respective research areas.

The conference they were attending, The Physics of Computation, was held from May 6 to 8 and cohosted by IBM and MITs Laboratory for Computer Science. It would come to be regarded as a seminal moment in the history of quantum computingnot that anyone present grasped that as it was happening.

Its hard to put yourself back in time, says Charlie Bennett, a distinguished physicist and information theorist who was part of the IBM Research contingent at the event. If youd said quantum computing, nobody would have understood what you were talking about.

Why was the conference so significant? According to numerous latter-day accounts, Feynman electrified the gathering by calling for the creation of a quantum computer. But I dont think he quite put it that way, contends Bennett, who took Feynmans comments less as a call to action than a provocative observation. He just said the world is quantum, Bennett remembers. So if you really wanted to build a computer to simulate physics, that should probably be a quantum computer.

For a guide to whos who in this 1981 Physics of Computation photo, click here. [Photo: courtesy of Charlie Bennett, who isnt in itbecause he took it]Even if Feynman wasnt trying to kick off a moonshot-style effort to build a quantum computer, his talkand The Physics of Computation conference in generalproved influential in focusing research resources. Quantum computing was nobodys day job before this conference, says Bennett. And then some people began considering it important enough to work on.

It turned out to be such a rewarding area for study that Bennett is still working on it in 2021and hes still at IBM Research, where hes been, aside from the occasional academic sabbatical, since 1972. His contributions have been so significant that hes not only won numerous awards but also had one named after him. (On Thursday, he was among the participants in an online conference on quantum computings past, present, and future that IBM held to mark the 40th anniversary of the original meeting.)

Charlie Bennett [Photo: courtesy of IBM]These days, Bennett has plenty of company. In recent years, quantum computing has become one of IBMs biggest bets, as it strives to get the technology to the point where its capable of performing useful work at scale, particularly for the large organizations that have long been IBMs core customer base. Quantum computing is also a major area of research focus at other tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Intel, and Honeywell, as well as a bevy of startups.

According to IBM senior VP and director of research Dario Gil, the 1981 Physics of Computation conference played an epoch-shifting role in getting the computing community excited about quantum physicss possible benefits. Before then, in the context of computing, it was seen as a source of noiselike a bothersome problem that when dealing with tiny devices, they became less reliable than larger devices, he says. People understood that this was driven by quantum effects, but it was a bug, not a feature.

Making progress in quantum computing has continued to require setting aside much of what we know about computers in their classical form. From early room-sized mainframe monsters to the smartphone in your pocket, computing has always boiled down to performing math with bits set either to one or zero. But instead of depending on bits, quantum computers leverage quantum mechanics through a basic building block called a quantum bit, or qubit. It can represent a one, a zero, orin a radical departure from classical computingboth at once.

Dario Gil [Photo: courtesy of IBM]Qubits give quantum computers the potential to rapidly perform calculations that might be impossibly slow on even the fastest classical computers. That could have transformative benefits for applications ranging from drug discovery to cryptography to financial modeling. But it requires mastering an array of new challenges, including cooling superconducting qubits to a temperature only slightly above abolute zero, or -459.67 Farenheit.

Four decades after the 1981 conference, quantum computing remains a research project in progress, albeit one thats lately come tantalizingly close to fruition. Bennett says that timetable isnt surprising or disappointing. For a truly transformative idea, 40 years just isnt that much time: Charles Babbage began working on his Analytical Engine in the 1830s, more than a century before technological progress reached the point where early computers such as IBMs own Automated Sequence Controlled Calculator could implement his concepts in a workable fashion. And even those machines came nowhere near fulfilling the vision scientists had already developed for computing, including some things that [computers] failed at miserably for decades, like language translation, says Bennett.

I think was the first time ever somebody said the phrase quantum information theory.

In 1970, as a Harvard PhD candidate, Bennett was brainstorming with fellow physics researcher Stephen Wiesner, a friend from his undergraduate days at Brandeis. Wiesner speculated that quantum physics would make it possible to send, through a channel with a nominal capacity of one bit, two bits of information; subject however to the constraint that whichever bit the receiver choose to read, the other bit is destroyed, as Bennett jotted in notes whichfortunately for computing historyhe preserved.

Charlie Bennetts 1970 notes on Stephen Wiesners musings about quantum physics and computing (click to expand). [Photo: courtesy of Charlie Bennett]I think was the first time ever somebody said the phrase quantum information theory,' says Bennett. The idea that you could do things of not just a physics nature, but an information processing nature with quantum effects that you couldnt do with ordinary data processing.

Like many technological advances of historic proportionsAI is another examplequantum computing didnt progress from idea to reality in an altogether predictable and efficient way. It took 11 years from Wiesners observation until enough people took the topic seriously enough to inspire the Physics of Computation conference. Bennett and the University of Montreals Gilles Brassard published important research on quantum cryptography in 1984; in the 1990s, scientists realized that quantum computers had the potential to be exponentially faster than their classical forebears.

All along, IBM had small teams investigating the technology. According to Gil, however, it wasnt until around 2010 that the company had made enough progress that it began to see quantum computing not just as an intriguing research area but as a powerful business opportunity. What weve seen since then is this dramatic progress over the last decade, in terms of scale, effort, and investment, he says.

IBMs superconducting qubits need to be kept chilled in a super fridge. [Photo: courtesy of IBM]As IBM made that progress, it shared it publicly so that interested parties could begin to get their heads around quantum computing at the earliest opportunity. Starting in May 2016, for instance, the company made quantum computing available as a cloud service, allowing outsiders to tinker with the technology in a very early form.

It is really important that when you put something out, you have a path to deliver.

One of the things that road maps provide is clarity, he says, allowing that road maps without execution are hallucinations, so it is really important that when you put something out, you have a path to deliver.

Scaling up quantum computing into a form that can trounce classical computers at ambitious jobs requires increasing the number of reliable qubits that a quantum computer has to work with. When IBM published its quantum hardware road map last September, it had recently deployed the 65-qubit IBM Quantum Hummingbird processor, a considerable advance on its previous 5- and 27-qubit predecessors. This year, the company plans to complete the 127-qubit IBM Quantum Eagle. And by 2023, it expects to have a 1,000-qubit machine, the IBM Quantum Condor. Its this machine, IBM believes, that may have the muscle to achieve quantum advantage by solving certain real-world problems faster the worlds best supercomputers.

Essential though it is to crank up the supply of qubits, the software side of quantum computings future is also under construction, and IBM published a separate road map devoted to the topic in February. Gil says that the company is striving to create a frictionless environment in which coders dont have to understand how quantum computing works any more than they currently think about a classical computers transistors. An IBM software layer will handle the intricacies (and meld quantum resources with classical ones, which will remain indispensable for many tasks).

You dont need to know quantum mechanics, you dont need to know a special programming language, and youre not going to need to know how to do these gate operations and all that stuff, he explains. Youre just going to program with your favorite language, say, Python. And behind the scenes, there will be the equivalent of libraries that call on these quantum circuits, and then they get delivered to you on demand.

IBM is still working on making quantum computing ready for everyday reality, but its already worked with designers to make it look good. [Photo: courtesy of IBM]In this vision, we think that at the end of this decade, there may be as many as a trillion quantum circuits that are running behind the scene, making software run better, Gil says.

Even if IBM clearly understands the road ahead, theres plenty left to do. Charlie Bennett says that quantum researchers will overcome remaining challenges in much the same way that he and others confronted past ones. Its hard to look very far ahead, but the right approach is to maintain a high level of expertise and keep chipping away at the little problems that are causing a thing not to work as well as it could, he says. And then when you solve that one, there will be another one, which you wont be able to understand until you solve the first one.

As for Bennetts own current work, he says hes particularly interested in the intersection betweeninformation theory and cosmologynot so much because I think I can learn enough about it to make an original research contribution, but just because its so much fun to do. Hes also been making explainer videos about quantum computing, a topic whose reputation for being weird and mysterious he blames on inadequate explanation by others.

Unfortunately, the majority of science journalists dont understand it, he laments. And they say confusing things about itpainfully, for me, confusing things.

For IBM Research, Bennett is both a living link to its past and an inspiration for its future. Hes had such a massive impact on the people we have here, so many of our top talent, says Gil. In my view, weve accrued the most talented group of people in the world, in terms of doing quantum computing. So many of them trace it back to the influence of Charlie. Impressive though Bennetts 49-year tenure at the company is, the fact that hes seen and made so much quantum computing historyincluding attending the 1981 conferenceand is here to talk about it is a reminder of how young the field still is.

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IBM and MIT kickstarted the age of quantum computing in 1981 - Fast Company

With an ability to analyze and rapidly process extremely large datasets, quantum computing promises to enable transformational advances in everything from the rapid discovery of new drugs and vaccines to secure storage and transmission of personal information. The key to the speed of quantum computers lies in qubits, the basic units of information that can exist in multiple states, a phenomenon that provides far more processing power than the binary bits of classical computers.

Quantum computers are difficult to engineer, build and program, however, because highly sensitive qubits are easily affected by environmental disturbance, referred to as noise, such as temperature fluctuations and vibrations. Most qubits also need to be cooled to absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius) to be usable. One potential solution being explored by researchers at UC Santa Barbara involves photonics, the science of using and controlling photons, which is the smallest unit of light. Photonic circuits can transfer data faster than traditional electronic circuits, and today power data centers and make the internet possible.

Photons have several potential advantages for quantum computing, most notably room-temperature operation, said Galan Moody, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE). They also dont interact strongly with their environment, so they retain their quantum states for really long periods of time.

According to Moody, integrated photonics the design and fabrication of photonic devices in which all of the components, ranging from lasers to optical interconnects, are contained on one chip is especially promising. Its a field in which UCSB researchers have established themselves as world leaders.

Integrated photonics offer additional advantages, including the ability to leverage the national photonic infrastructure already developed and the high density of components that can be integrated onto a single photonic chip, said Moody. This will help with reliability, stability, and most importantly, scalability.

In support of his effort to develop a new quantum photonic platform that allows for chip-scale quantum information processing with light, Moody has received an Early CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a prestigious honor that comes with $500,000 in research funding over five years.

Its an incredible honor, and its a testament to the dedication and hard work of my students and postdocs, especially with the challenges everyone has faced this past year, said Moody. I couldnt be prouder of my group, who really made it possible for me to receive this award. It validates the vision weve been developing over the past couple of years, and it provides support for us to help drive the field of quantum photonics into exciting new directions over the next five years and beyond.

Moody says the award is a direct result of the tremendous mentoring he has received from the college and his department, as well as rewarding collaborations most notably with John Bowers, a distinguished professor of materials and ECE and the director of UCSBs Institute for Energy Efficiency (IEE).

We congratulate Professor Galan Moody on this great recognition of his work and the tremendous potential of his research on quantum photonics, said Rod Alferness, dean of the College of Engineering. We are tremendously proud to see junior faculty, like Professor Moody, rewarded for pushing the boundaries of science and technology to benefit society. I look forward to the research and mentorship this support will enable.

Conventional integrated photonic devices utilize silicon waveguides surrounded by an insulator, such as silicon dioxide, to guide light around a photonic chip. Moodys plan is to replace silicon with the III-V semiconductor alloy aluminum gallium arsenide (AlGaAs).

We expect several new important capabilities and better performance than we get from silicon, including more efficient quantum light sources, a reduced need for laser power to pump the sources, better electrical efficiency and significantly less optical loss in order to preserve the photons quantum state, said Moody.

The first stage of his project is to develop all of the necessary components to carry out certain quantum computations on a chip. These include improvements to his groups existing entangled-photon pair sources, and developing methods to convert quantum states throughout the visible and telecommunications wavelengths.

Once we fabricate, test and benchmark these components, we hope to find significant performance advantages compared to other approaches, such as silicon, Moody said.

The next phase is to design optical processor architectures and carry out some of the basic quantum operations on photons that are needed for a functional quantum computer. Lastly, they will begin to scale up their designs with the goal of demonstrating a practical and useful quantum computer using light.

While a quantum computer that can perform complex computations is a long-term goal, we expect to answer many important fundamental and practical questions in the short term, such as how can we make the most efficient quantum light source and what are the materials challenges we need to address to do this, said Moody. Our research may also lead to innovations in areas other than computing, including faster and more secure optical networks and satellite-based quantum communications.

The timing of the NSF CAREER award worked out perfectly for Moody. His research lab moved into Henley Hall, a state-of-the-art facility that opened in fall 2020. Moody also recently received the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) award from the Department of Defense to build the instrumentation needed to test the quantum photonic chips that his group will design and fabricate as part of the NSF CAREER award.

These experiments require a high level of temperature and vibrational stability, which is possible with the new lab space in Henley Hall, said Moody. This combination of state-of-the-art lab space and well-maintained shared facilities on campus, like the Nanofabrication Facility, make UCSB a really unique and exciting environment, and as a relatively new faculty member, Im fortunate to be a part of it.

The NSF funding also will jumpstart ambitious teaching and outreach programs that Moodys group has been developing, including a remote quantum teaching lab that will be accessible to online users beginning with a joint pilot program with Santa Barbara City College. They also plan to bring regional high school students from underrepresented communities to campus for an interactive quantum learning experience with the Media Arts and Technology Program, and to launch an outreach program for K-8 students and their families to learn about quantum science and engineering.

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Lighting the Way to Quantum Computers | The UCSB Current - The UCSB Current

ARMONK, N.Y., May 7, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today it has extended its IBM Global University Program with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to 40 schools.

IBM is now working with the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education (AABHE), 100 Black Men of America, Inc., Advancing Minorities' Interest in Engineering (AMIE) and the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to better prepare HBCU students for in-demand jobs in the digital economy.

In parallel, the IBM Institute for Business Value released a new reportwith broad-ranging recommendations on how businesses can cultivate more diverse, inclusive workforces by establishing similar programs and deepening engagement with HBCUs.

IBM's HBCU program momentum has been strong in an environment where only 43% of leaders across industry and academia believe higher education prepares students with necessary workforce skills.* In September 2020, IBM announced the investment of $100 million in assets, technology and resources to HBCUs across the United States. Through IBM Global University Programs, which include the continuously enhanced IBM Academic Initiative and IBM Skills Academy, IBM has now:

Building on this work, IBM and key HBCU ecosystem partners are now collaborating to expedite faculty and student access and use of IBM's industry resources.

In its new report, "Investing in Black Technical Talent: The Power of Partnering with HBCUs," IBM describes how HBCUs succeed in realizing their mission and innovate to produce an exceptional talent pipeline, despite serious funding challenges. IBM explains its approach to broad-based HBCU collaboration with a series of best-practices for industry organizations.

IBM's series of best practices include:

To download the full report, please visit: LINK.

HBCU students continue to engage with IBM on a wide range of opportunities. These include students taking artificial intelligence, cybersecurity or cloud e-learning courses and receiving a foundational industry badge certificate in four hours. Many also attend IBM's virtual student Wednesday seminars with leading experts, such as IBM neuroscientists who discuss the implications of ethics in neurotechnology.

Statements from Collaborators "HBCUs typically deliver a high return on investment. They have less money in their endowments, faculty is responsible for teaching a larger volume of classes per term and they receive less revenue per student than non-HBCUs. Yet, HBCUs produce almost a third of all African-American STEM graduates,"** said Valinda Kennedy, HBCU Program Manager, IBM Global University Programs and co-author of "Investing in Black Technical Talent: The Power of Partnering with HBCUs.""It is both a racial equity and an economic imperative for U.S. industry competitiveness to develop the most in-demand skills and jobs for all students and seek out HBCU students who are typically underrepresented in many of the most high-demand areas."

"100 Black Men of America, Inc. is proud to collaboratewith IBM to deliver these exceptional and needed resources to the HBCU community and students attending these institutions. The 100 has long supported and sought to identify mechanisms that aid in the sustainability of historically black colleges and universities. This collaboration and the access and opportunities provided by IBM will make great strides in advancing that goal," stated 100 Black Men of America Chairman Thomas W. Dortch, Jr.

"The American Association of Blacks in Higher Education is proud to collaborate with IBM," said Dereck Rovaris, President, AABHE. "Our mission to be the premier organization to drive leadership development, access and vital issues concerning Blacks in higher education works perfectly with IBM's mission to lead in the creation, development and manufacture of the industry's most advanced information technologies.Togetherthis collaboration will enhance both organizations and the many people we serve."

"IBM is a strong AMIE partnerwhose role is strategic and support is significant in developing a diverse engineering workforce through AMIE and our HBCU community.IBM's presence on AMIE's Board of Directors provides leadership for AMIE's strategies,key initiatives and programsto achieve our goal of a diverse engineering workforce," said Veronica Nelson, Executive Director, AMIE."IBM programslike the IBM Academic Initiative and the IBM Skills Academyprovideaccess, assets and opportunities for our HBCU faculty and students to gain high-demand skills in areas like AI, cybersecurity, blockchain, quantum computing and cloud computing. IBM is a key sponsor of the annual AMIE Design Challenge introducing students to new and emerging technologies through industry collaborations and providing experiential activities like IBM Enterprise Design Thinking, which is the foundational platform for the Design Challenge. The IBM Masters and PhD Fellowship Awards program supports our HBCU students with mentoring, collaboration opportunities on disruptive technologies as well as a financial award. The IBM Blue Movement HBCU Coding Boot Camp enables and recognizes programming competencies. IBM also sponsors scholarships for the students at the 15 HBCU Schools of Engineering to support their educational pursuits. IBM continues to evolve its engagement with AMIE and the HBCU Schools of Engineering."

"The IBM Skills Academy is timely in providing resources that support the creativity of my students in the Dual Degree Engineering Program at Clark Atlanta University," said Dr. Olugbemiga A. Olatidoye, Professor, Dual Degree Engineering and Director, Visualization, Stimulation and Design Laboratory, Clark Atlanta University. "It also allows my students to be skillful in their design thinking process, which resulted in an IBM digital badge certificate and a stackable credential for their future endeavors."

"We truly value the IBM skills programs and have benefitted from the Academic Initiative, Skills Academy and Global University Awards across all five campuses," saidDr. Derrick Warren, Interim Associate Dean and MBA Director, Southern University. "Over 24 faculty and staff have received instructor training and more than 300 students now have micro-certifications in AI, cloud, cybersecurity, data science, design thinking, Internet of Things, quantum computing and other offerings."

"At UNCF, we have a history of supporting HBCUs as they amplify their outsized impact on the Black community, and our work would not be possible without transformational partnerships with organizations like IBM and their IBM Global University Programs," said Ed Smith-Lewis, Executive Director of UNCF's Institute for Capacity Building. "We are excited to bring the resources of IBM to HBCUs, their faculty, and their students."

"IBM Skills Academy is an ideal platform for faculty to teach their students the latest in computing and internet technologies," said Dr. Sridhar Malkaram, West Virginia State University. "It helped the students in my Applied Data Mining course experience the state of the art in data science methods and analysis tools. The course completion badge/certificate has been an additional and useful incentive for students, which promoted their interest. The Skills Academy courses can be advantageously adapted by faculty, either as stand-alone courses or as part of existing courses."

About IBM:IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud, AI and business services provider. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. For more information visit: https://newsroom.ibm.com/home.

*King, Michael, Anthony Marshall, Dave Zaharchuk. "Pursuit of relevance: How higher education remains viable in today's dynamic world." IBM Institute for Business Value. Accessed March 23, 2021. https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/report/education-relevance

**Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System

IBM Media RelationsContact:Carrie Bendzsa[emailprotected]+1613-796-3880

SOURCE IBM

http://www.ibm.com

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IBM Extends HBCU Initiatives Through New Industry Collaborations - PRNewswire

We are honoring the excellence of these individuals, celebrating what they have achieved so far, and imagining what they will continue to accomplish, said David Oxtoby, President of the American Academy. The past year has been replete with evidence of how things can get worse; this is an opportunity to illuminate the importance of art, ideas, knowledge, and leadership that can make a better world.

Yacoby holds appointments in the Physics Department and at theHarvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences(SEAS)and is a member of the National Academy of Science.

Yacobys research explores topological quantum computing, interacting electrons in layered materials, spin-based quantum computing and the development of novel quantum sensing probes such as scanning single electron transistors and color centers in diamond for unraveling the underlying microscopic physics of correlated electron systems.

Yacoby is leading a research area at theDepartment of Energys Quantum Information Science (QIS) Research Centerat Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where his work will focus on using quantum sensing techniques to explore quantum materials.

Yacoby is a member and sits on the executive committee of theHarvard QuantumInitiativeand a participant in theCenter for Integrated Quantum Materials(CIQM), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center, based at SEAS. CIQM is dedicated to studying new quantum materials with non-conventional properties that could transform signal processing and computation.

Source: Harvard University

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Quantum Computing Professor, Researcher Yacoby Elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences - HPCwire

Quantum computing expert Andrew Fursman is convinced quantum attacks in the future will pose a threat to the security of Bitcoin (BTC).

In a video, Fursman highlights that the massive computational potential of quantum machines could be capable of compromising Bitcoins security.

Its mathematically proven that if you have a device that looks like the kind of quantum computers that people want to build, then you will be capable of decrypting this information significantly better than could ever be possible with classical devices.

Fursman argues that regardless of when quantum computers come of age, a solution needs to be found.

Whether quantum computers come out tomorrow or in five years or in ten years, they are capable of being cryptographically useful. Those devices are going to be capable of doing something that you might not want if you are somebody thats keeping a secret

So its worth kind of getting into what are the different ways that the blockchains rely on cryptography, and which of those are specifically relevant to the things that quantum computers of the future might do. And how much is that really a problem for people today, versus not a problem at all? And what things are maybe not a problem yet but we might want to be thinking about working on? Better to be safe than sorry.

While Fursman says that quantum machines may place Bitcoins cryptography in jeopardy, he notes that it will not happen anytime soon.

We might need actually significantly more qubits (quantum bits, or a unit of quantum information) than are currently available. And like I sort of alluded to, we might be at the point where the largest computers that we are building today end up really becoming the foundation of one logical qubit for one of these large devices

So if we need a thousand times more qubits then we might have in a few years, you sort of have to be thinking about the growth of these things from both the error correction standpoint and the number of logical qubits that you need to go forward

And I should say some people even put the number as high as millions that you might need. So we are definitely, we are not right around the corner from this. Its not going to happen next week.

I

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Is Quantum Computing Placing Bitcoins Future in Jeopardy? Quantum Expert Andrew Fursman on Future of Crypto - The Daily Hodl

Move aside, aluminum

Some of the most promising schemes for quantum information processing involve superconductors. In addition to the established superconducting qubits, topological qubits may one day be realized in semiconductor-superconductor heterostructures. The superconductor most widely used in this context is aluminum, in which processes that cause decoherence are suppressed. Pendharkar et al. go beyond this paradigm to show that superconducting tin can be used in place of aluminum (see the Perspective by Fatemi and Devoret). The authors grew nanowires of indium antimonide, which is a semiconductor, and coated them with a thin layer of tin without using cumbersome epitaxial growth techniques. This process creates a well-defined, hard superconducting gap in the nanowires, which is a prerequisite for using them as the basis for a potential topological qubit.

Science, this issue p. 508; see also p. 464

Improving materials used to make qubits is crucial to further progress in quantum information processing. Of particular interest are semiconductor-superconductor heterostructures that are expected to form the basis of topological quantum computing. We grew semiconductor indium antimonide nanowires that were coated with shells of tin of uniform thickness. No interdiffusion was observed at the interface between Sn and InSb. Tunnel junctions were prepared by in situ shadowing. Despite the lack of lattice matching between Sn and InSb, a 15-nanometer-thick shell of tin was found to induce a hard superconducting gap, with superconductivity persisting in magnetic field up to 4 teslas. A small island of Sn-InSb exhibits the two-electron charging effect. These findings suggest a less restrictive approach to fabricating superconducting and topological quantum circuits.

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Parity-preserving and magnetic fieldresilient superconductivity in InSb nanowires with Sn shells - Science Magazine

MONTREAL, April 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- infinityQ Technology, Inc., a women led, engineered and managed startup, today announced its groundbreaking computer, infinityQube. The Montral-based startup has coined its approach quantum analog computing, introducing a novel paradigm in the quantum space. The device is compact, energy-efficient and operates at room temperature, relying on established chip technologies.

We wanted to bring the computational power promised by quantum computing to the market today, said Aurlie Hlouis, CEO and co-founder of infinityQ. While quantum will eventually revolutionize computing, most experts agree that quantum devices will take another decade or more to mature. We, on the other hand, have developed a completely different approach "quantum analog computing." It is analog in two ways referring to analogies with atomic quantum systems as well as to analog electronics. In practice, this means infinityQ develops computational capabilities by using artificial atoms to exploit the superposition effect and achieve quantum computing capabilities without the error correction and cryogenics tax. This allows the company to utilize several times less energy than a typical CPU and that its machine's energy consumption is the same as a common light bulb.

Led by a former senior Navy officer, Aurlie Hlouis, and co-creator of both the Discoverer supercomputer and the infinityQube, Dr. Kapanova, infinityQs novel device is positioned to address some of the most challenging computational problems faced in enterprises, including finance, pharmaceutical, logistics, engineering, energy and more. While currently the company is focused on optimization problems, infinityQ is not limited to them.

As a demonstration of its capabilities, infinityQ used its hardware to solve the Traveling Salesperson Problem for 128 cities while other non-classical machines have solved 22 cities maximum.

"Our technology's additional advantages are two-fold. First, it can be integrated seamlessly into the existing HPC infrastructure," said Dr. Kapanova, CTO of infinityQ. "But moreover, our quantum-analog approach is ideal for the era of edge computing due to its room-temperature capability and low energy requirements."

With John Mullen, former Assistant Director of the CIA; Philippe Dollfus, Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); and Michel Kurek, both former Global Head of Algo Factory and Quantitative Trading for Societe Generale, on its advisory board, infinityQ has raised over $1 million USD in seed funding to date and is currently working with leading financial institutions and pharmaceutical companies on proofs-of-concept as investor-clients. Access to infinityQs hardware technology is available today via the cloud on an invitation-only basis.

infinityQ will make its industry debut at the virtual IQT Conference on May 17-20, 2021.

About infinityQ

Quantum-analog device innovator, infinityQ is leading a paradigm shift: While the current generation of the technology already delivers computational speed-up of 100 to 1000 times depending on the problem, the next generation of the technology will be faster and significantly more energy-efficient. infinityQ aims to address some of the most complex computational optimization problems facing finance, pharmaceutical, logistics, engineering, oil and gas, and other industries. Access to infinityQs hardware technology is available today via the cloud on an invitation-only basis.

For Media InquiriesFatimah NouilatiScratch Marketing + Media for infinityQfatimah@scratchmm.com

For Business Inquiries:Jackie HudspethDirector of Growth, infinityQ Technology, Inc.jackie@infinityq.tech

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infinityQube, the First Operational Quantum Analog Computer, Is Bringing Quantum Speed to Enterprise - GlobeNewswire

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is announcing a new public-private partnership aimed squarely at the development of next-generation technologies: the Resilient & Intelligent NextG Systems (RINGS) program. RINGS will focus on accelerating research in the areas of wireless and mobile communication, networking, sensing, computing systems and global-scale services.

[Next-generation] systems are future versions of todays cellular, Wi-Fi and satellite networks that are expected to connect billions of people and revolutionize the relationship between users devices and cloud services, the NSF wrote. The new systems will enable enhanced data streaming, communications, analytics and automation. These future networks and systems will provide key support to societal priorities such as education, transportation, public health and safety, defense and associated critical infrastructure.

Notably, the NSF is stressing the importance of resilience in these next-generation systems in order for them to survive, gracefully adapt to and rapidly recover from malicious attacks, component failures and natural and human-induced disruptions. With escalating incursions from unfriendly international actors e.g. the high-profile SolarWinds attack, which involved Russian hackers compromising a network monitoring service the renewed emphasis on and investment in network cybersecurity is well-timed.

The NSF is partnering with a number of fellow government agencies and high-profile corporations for RINGS, including the Department of Defense (Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering), the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Apple, Ericsson, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Qualcomm and VMware, among others.

RINGS will be funded to the tune of around $40 million, which includes contributions from each of the partners. The private-sector partners are also offering their technical insight and expertise to the program, with an eye toward helping to accelerate resulting technologies in the future.

Since I joined NSF, I have championed public-private partnerships as a critical foundation for advancing the frontiers of science and driving home solutions to some of our foremost societal challenges, said SethuramanPanchanathan, director of the NSF. I am delighted we are launching this multi-sector collaboration to drive the innovations that will shape future communication networks so vital to everyday life.

Proposals are now open for funding under RINGS, which the NSF calls its single largest effort to date to engage public and private partners to jointly support a research program. RINGS plans to award 36-48 awards, with each award including up to $1 million in funding across up to three years. The deadline for proposal submission is July 29, 2021. To learn more about RINGS, view the program solicitation at this link.

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NSF, Partners Form 'RINGS,' a New Initiative to Catalyze Next-Gen Computing and Networking - HPCwire

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When it comes to grappling with the future of quantum computing, enterprises are scrambling to figure just how seriously they should take this new computing architecture. Many executives are trapped between the anxiety of missing the next wave of innovation and the fear of being played for suckers by people overhyping quantums revolutionary potential.

Thats why the approach to quantum by pharmaceutical giant Merck offers a clear-eyed roadmap for other enterprises to follow. The company is taking a cautious but informed approach that includes setting up an internal working group and partnering with quantum startup Seeqc to monitor developments while keeping an open mind.

According to Philipp Harbach, a theoretical chemist who is head of Mercks In Silico Research group, a big part of the challenge remains trying to keep expectations of executives reasonable even as startup funding to quantum soars and the hype continues to mount.

We are not evangelists of quantum computers, Harbach said. But we are also not skeptics. We are just realistic. If you talk to academics, they tell you there is no commercial value. And if you talk to our management, they tell you in 3 years they want a product out of it. So, there are two worlds colliding that are not very compatible. I think thats typical for every hype cycle.

Mercks desire for the dream of quantum computing to become reality is understandable. The fundamental nature of its business biology and chemistry means the company has been building molecular or quantum level models for more than a century.

Part of the role of the In Silico Research group is to develop those models that can solve quantum problems using evolving technologies such as data analytics and AI and applying them to natural sciences to make experimental work less time-consuming.

But those models are always limited and imperfect because they are being calculated on non-quantum platforms that cant fully mimic the complexity of interactions. If someone can build a fully fault-tolerant quantum computer that operates at sufficient scale and cost, Merck could unlock a new generation of efficiencies and scientific breakthroughs.

The quantum computer will be another augmentation to a classical computer, Harbach said. It wont be a replacement, but an augmentation which will tackle some of these problems in a way that we cannot imagine. Hopefully, it will speed them up in a way that the efficacy of the methods we are employing will be boosted.

About 3 years ago, Merck decided it was time to start educating itself about the emerging quantum sector. The companys venture capital arm, M Ventures, began looking within the company for experts who could help it with due diligence as it began to assess quantum startups. That included mapping out the players and the whole value chain of quantum computing, according to Harbach.

That led to the formal creation of the Quantum Computing Task Force, which has roughly 50 members who try to communicate with quantum players large and small as well as peers among Mercks own competition.

We are basically an interest group trying to understand this topic, Harbach said. Thats why we have a quite good overview and understanding on timelines, player possibilities, and applications.

As part of that exploration, M Ventures eventually began investing in quantum-related startups. In April 2020, the venture fund announced a $5 million investment in Seeqc, a New York-based startup that bills itself as the Digital Quantum Computing company.

We thought that it might be good to have partners in the hardware part and in the software part, Harbach said. Seeqc will partner with us within Merck to really work on problems basically as a hardware partner.

Seeqc is developing a hybrid approach that it believes will make quantum computing useful sooner. The idea is to combine classical computing architectures with quantum computing. It does this through its system-on-a-chip design.

This technology was originally developed at Hypres, a semiconductor electronics developer which spun out Seeqc last year. The M Ventures funding for Seeqc followed a previous $6.8 million seed round. Seeqc raised a subsequent round of $22 million last September in a round led by EQT Ventures.

According to Seeqc CEO John Levy, the companys technology allows it to address some of the fundamental challenges facing quantum systems. Despite rapid advancements in recent years, quantum computers remain too unstable to deliver the high-performance computing needed to justify their costs.

Part of the reason for that is that qubits, the unit of quantum computing power, need to be kept at near-freezing temperatures to process. Scaling then becomes costly and difficult because a system operating with thousands of qubits would be immensely complex to manage, in part because of the massive heating issue.

Levy said Seeqc can address that problem by placing classic microchips over a qubit array to stabilize the environment at cryogenic temperatures while maintaining speed and reducing latency. The company uses a single-flux quantum technology that it has developed and that replaces the microwave pulses being used in other quantum systems. As a result, the company says its platform enables quantum computing at about 1/400 of the cost of current systems in development.

We have taken much of the complexity that youve seen in a quantum computer and weve removed almost all of that by building a set of chips that weve designed, Levy said.

Just as important is a philosophical approach Seeqc is taking. Its not building a general-purpose quantum computer. Instead, it plans to build application-specific ones that are tailored specifically to the problems a client is trying to solve. Because Seeqc has its own chip foundry, it can customize its chips to the needs of application developers as they create different algorithms, Levy said.

In that spirit, Mercks Quantum Computing Task Force is working closely with Seeqc to create viable quantum computers that can be used by its various businesses.

Their technology is a key technology to scale a quantum computer, which is actually much more important because it will make quantum computers bigger and cheaper, Harbach said. And this is, of course, essential for the whole market.

For all this activity, Harbachs view of quantums potential remains sober. He sees nothing on the market that will have any commercial impact, certainly not for Merck. At this point, many of the companys questions remain academic.

What we are basically interested in is how or will the quantum computer hardware ever be scalable to a level that it can tackle problems of realistic size to us, Harbach said. And the same question also goes to the software side. Will there ever be algorithms that can basically mimic these problems on a quantum computer efficiently so that they dont run into noise problems? We are not interested in simulating a molecule right now on a quantum computer. Everything we try to understand is about the timelines: What will be possible and when will it possible.

Harbach has watched the rise in quantum startup funding and various milestone announcements but remains dubious of many of these claims.

They are creating a new market where theres not even the technology ready for it, Harbach said. You have to stay realistic. Theres a lot of money at the moment from governments and VCs. Theres a lot of boost from consultancies because they try to sell the consultancy. And if you talk to experts, its the other way around. They tell you not before 15 years.

The questions Merck asks internally are split into 2 fundamental categories: When will there be a quantum computer that can be more efficient at processing its current quantum models? And when will there be a quantum computer that is so powerful that it opens up new problems and new solutions that the company cannot even imagine today?

Quantum will be a thing, definitely, Harbach said. The only question is when, and Im really, really sure it wont be in the next two years. I wouldnt even say three years. There will be a quantum winter. Winter is coming.

Excerpt from:

How Merck works with Seeqc to cut through quantum computing hype - VentureBeat

Researchers from Spain, Finland and France have demonstrated that magnetism and superconductivity can coexist in graphene, opening a path towards graphene-based topological qubits.

Schematic illustration of the interplay of magnetism and superconductivity in a graphene grain boundary, a potential building block for carbon-based topological qubits Credit: Jose Lado/Aalto University

In the quantum realm, electrons can behave in interesting ways. Magnetism is one of these behaviors that can be seen in everyday life, as is the rarer phenomena of superconductivity. Intriguingly, these two behaviors are often antagonists - the existence of one of them often destroys the other. However, if these two opposite quantum states are forced to coexist artificially, an elusive state called a topological superconductor appears, which is useful for researchers trying to make topological qubits.

Topological qubits are exciting as one of the potential technologies for future quantum computers. In particular, topological qubits provide the basis for topological quantum computing, which is attractive because it is much less sensitive to interference from its surroundings from perturbing the measurements. However, designing and controlling topological qubits has remained a problem, largely due to the difficulty of finding materials capable of hosting these states, such as topological superconductors.

To overcome the elusiveness of topological superconductors, which are very hard to find in natural materials, physicists have developed ways to engineer these states by combining common materials. The basic ingredients to engineer topological superconductors magnetism and superconductivity often require combining dramatically different materials. Whats more, creating a topological superconducting material requires being able to finely tune the magnetism and superconductivity, so researchers have to prove that their material can be both magnetic and superconductive at the same time, and that they can control both properties. In their search for such a material, researchers have turned to graphene.

Graphene represents a controllable and common material and has been suggested as one of the critical materials for quantum technologies. However, the coexistence of magnetism and superconductivity has remained elusive in graphene, despite long-standing experimental efforts that demonstrated the existence of these two states independently. This fundamental limitation represents a critical obstacle towards the development of artificial topological superconductivity in graphene.

In a recent breakthrough experiment, researchers at the UAM in Spain, CNRS in France, and INL in Portugal, together with the theoretical support of Prof. Jose Lado at Aalto University, have demonstrated an initial step along a pathway towards topological qubits in graphene. The researchers demonstrated that single layers of graphene can host simultaneous magnetism and superconductivity, by measuring quantum excitations unique to this interplay. This breakthrough finding was accomplished by combining the magnetism of crystal domains in graphene, and the superconductivity of deposited metallic islands.

This experiment shows that two key paradigmatic quantum orders, superconductivity, and magnetism, can simultaneously coexist in graphene, said Professor Jose Lado, Ultimately, this experiment demonstrates that graphene can simultaneously host the necessary ingredients for topological superconductivity. While in the current experiment we have not yet observed topological superconductivity, building on top of this experiment we can potentially open a new pathway towards carbon-based topological qubits.

The researchers induced superconductivity in graphene by depositing an island of a conventional superconductor close to grain boundaries, naturally forming seams in the graphene which have a slightly different magnetic properties to the rest of the material. The superconductivity and grain boundary magnetism was demonstrated to give rise to Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states, which can only exists in a material when magnetism and superconductivity coexisting together. The phenomena the team observed in the experiment matched up with the theoretical model developed by Professor Lado, showing that the researchers can fully control the quantum phenomena in their designer hybrid system.

The demonstration of Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states in graphene is the first step towards the ultimate development of graphene-based topological qubits. In particular, by carefully controlling Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states, topological superconductivity and Majorana states can be created. Topological qubits based on Majorana states can potentially drastically overcome the limitations of current qubits, protecting quantum information by exploiting the nature of these unconventional states. The emergence of these states requires meticulous control of the system parameters. The current experiment establishes the critical starting point towards this goal, which can be built upon to hopefully open a disruptive road to carbon-based topological quantum computers.

Original post:

Researchers take a step towards achieving topological qubits in graphene - Graphene-Info