Commentary and a selection of the most important recent news, articles, and papers about Quantum.
Today’s Brief Commentary
Today’s links include three to press releases for planned Q3 2024 earnings reports for D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti Computing. All have announced deals this quarter and some interesting results. The big news was the US Air Force Research Laboratory contract for US $54.5M with IonQ. As I travel around and speak at conferences, many people have questions about this deal, including:
- How was the money appropriated?
- Was it specifically earmarked for this deal?
- Why was it so large?
- Will the work be for quantum networking, quantum computing, or both?
We will see, of course, as technical results are announced. I cover the IonQ-AFRL deal in my research note for The Futurum Group “Quantum in Context: IonQ Announces a Huge Deal with the US AFRL.”
For all three companies, keep an eye on their reported Net Loss and Total Current Assets. Given the recent failure of Zapata AI, people are on edge regarding the health of small quantum companies.
General News, Articles, and Analyses
U.S. Department of Energy Announces $30 Million to Use Quantum Computing for Groundbreaking Chemistry and Materials Science Simulations
Author: Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy
(Thursday, October 24, 2024) “The U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) today announced funding to pioneer a new approach to studying chemistry and materials. The Quantum Computing for Computational Chemistry (QC3) program aims to develop quantum algorithms to revolutionize diverse areas of energy research, such as designing new and sustainable industrial catalysts, discovering new superconductors for more efficient electricity transmission, and developing improved battery chemistries.”
Rigetti and Riverlane Progress Towards Fault Tolerant Quantum Computing with Real-Time and Low Latency Error Correction on Rigetti QPU
(Thursday, October 31, 2024) “By integrating Riverlane’s quantum error decoder into the control system of Rigetti’s 84-qubit Ankaa™-2 system, the team was able to demonstrate real-time, low latency quantum error correction, a critical process for developing fault tolerant quantum computers”
The Dead End Quantum Dragon
Author: Brian N. Siegelwax
(Friday, November 1, 2024) “Some algos ain’t gonna make it. Some algos just can’t take it.”
Company Earnings Announcements
IonQ to Report Third Quarter 2024 Financial Results on November 6, 2024
Commentary:
The link has the information for joining the announcement discussion.(Wednesday, October 16, 2024) “IonQ (NYSE: IONQ), a leader in the quantum computing industry, today announced that the company will release its financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2024, on Wednesday, November 6, 2024, after the financial markets close.”
Rigetti Computing to Report Third Quarter 2024 Financial Results and Host Conference Call on November 12, 2024
Commentary:
The link has the information for joining the announcement discussion.(Tuesday, October 29, 2024) “Rigetti Computing, Inc. (“Rigetti” or the “Company”) (Nasdaq: RGTI), a pioneer in hybrid quantum-classical computing, announced today that it will release third quarter 2024 results on Tuesday, November 12, 2024 pre-market open. The Company will host a conference call to discuss its financial results and provide an update on its business operations at 8:30 a.m. ET the same day.”
D-Wave Quantum to Report Third Quarter 2024 Financial Results on November 14, 2024
Commentary: The link has the information for joining the announcement discussion.
(Thursday, October 31, 2024) “D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) (“D-Wave”), a leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services, today announced it will release its financial results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2024 ended September 30, 2024 on Thursday, November 14 before market open. The press release will be available on the D-Wave Investor Relations website: https://ir.dwavesys.com/.
In conjunction with this announcement, D-Wave will host a conference call on Thursday, November 14, 2024, at 8:00 a.m. (Eastern Time), to discuss the Company’s financial results and business outlook. The live dial-in number is 1-800-717-1738 (domestic) or 1-646-307-1865 (international). Participating in the call will be Chief Executive Officer Dr. Alan Baratz and Chief Financial Officer John Markovich.”
Technical Papers, Articles, and Preprints
[1112.0564] Linear Nearest Neighbor Synthesis of Reversible Circuits by Graph Partitioning
https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.0564
Authors: Chakrabarti, Amlan; Sur-Kolay, Susmita; and Chaudhury, Ayan
(Thursday, December 27, 2012) “Linear Nearest Neighbor (LNN) synthesis in reversible circuits has emerged as an important issue in terms of technological implementation for quantum computation. The objective is to obtain a LNN architecture with minimum gate cost. As achieving optimal synthesis is a hard problem, heuristic methods have been proposed in recent literature. In this work we present a graph partitioning based approach for LNN synthesis with reduction in circuit cost. In particular, the number of SWAP gates required to convert a given gate-level quantum circuit to its equivalent LNN configuration is minimized. Our algorithm determines the reordering of indices of the qubit line(s) for both single control and multiple controlled gates. Experimental results for placing the target qubits of Multiple Controlled Toffoli (MCT) library of benchmark circuits show a significant reduction in gate count and quantum gate cost compared to those of related research works.”
[2410.23857] ECDQC: Efficient Compilation for Distributed Quantum Computing with Linear Layout
https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23857
Authors: Liu, Kecheng; Zhou, Yidong; Luo, Haochen; Xiong, Lingjun; Zhu, Yuchen; Casey, Eilis; Cheng, Jinglei; Chen, Samuel Yen-Chi; and Liang, Zhiding
(Thursday, October 31, 2024) “In this paper, we propose an efficient compilation method for distributed quantum computing (DQC) using the Linear Nearest Neighbor (LNN) architecture. By exploiting the LNN topology’s symmetry, we optimize quantum circuit compilation for High Local Connectivity, Sparse Full Connectivity (HLC-SFC) algorithms like Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT). We also utilize dangling qubits to minimize non-local interactions and reduce SWAP gates. Our approach significantly decreases compilation time, gate count, and circuit depth, improving scalability and robustness for large-scale quantum computations.”
Related Articles and Papers
Quantum Computing for Computational Chemistry
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/technologies/programs/qc3
Author: Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy
(Thursday, October 24, 2024) “The Quantum Computing for Computational Chemistry program (QC3) aims to harness the transformative power of quantum computing to accelerate energy innovation. Computation plays an essential role in modern research and development, but classical, nonquantum computers struggle to simulate quantum systems with the speed, scale, and accuracy necessary to advance many commercial energy applications. This program will support the research and development of scalable, generalizable quantum computing approaches for computational chemistry and materials science.”
