Commentary and a selection of the most important recent news, articles, and papers about Quantum.
Today’s Brief Commentary
IBM had a lot of news this week on the occasion of their first Quantum Developer Conference held at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. The lab is about 35 miles (56 km) north of New York City. I maintained an office there for over 25 years across my two stints in the company’s division.
One of the main points they highlighted was their new ability to sometimes “accurately run” circuits with up to 5,000 two-qubit gates. They can do this through recent improvements to hardware (the Heron QPU) and software (Qiskit).
Why is this important? First, you are not doing quantum computing unless you can run two-qubit gates well, as these are the basis for forming qubit entanglement. Second, to reach Practical Quantum Advantage, we must do many of these, on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of one- and two-qubit gates.
A superconducting quantum computer has fast gates but relatively short coherence times, the times before the information in the qubits becomes useless. If we can have fast, high-quality gates and can do many of them, we may potentially solve problems in a shorter amount of time than approaches with long coherence times but also relatively slow gate speeds.
Assuming we get to quantum computers that are big enough and powerful enough to solve production problems (and not just “utility” ones), we will trade off processing time along with many engineering factors such as SWaP-C, Size, Weight, Power, and Cost.
Sound familiar? We are doing the same with AI. After all, quantum computing is just a form of computing.
General News, Articles, and Analyses
Ericsson Invests $456M for Quantum, Tech Research in Canada
https://www.iotworldtoday.com/quantum/ericsson-invests-456m-for-quantum-tech-research-in-canada
Author: Berenice Baker
(Tuesday, November 12, 2024) “Ericsson and the government of Canada have expanded their partnership with a substantial funding increase, with Ericsson committing $456 million to research facilities in Ottawa and Montreal.”
Quantum Computing
XeedQ installs Baby Diamond quantum computer at Goethe University – DCD
Author: Charlotte Trueman
Commentary:
Yet another company out to democratize quantum computing. They advertise that their system “elegantly fits in your home office.”(Monday, November 11, 2024) “Quantum computing company XeedQ has installed its so-called Baby Diamond quantum computer at Goethe University in Germany. The system is housed on the university’s Bockenheim campus and will support research into quantum mechanics and computation.”
IBM Launches Its Most Advanced Quantum Computers, Fueling New Scientific Value and Progress towards Quantum Advantage
Commentary:
IBM‘s first Quantum Developer Conference was this week and was the compelling event for these announcements.(Wednesday, November 13, 2024) “IBM Quantum Heron, the company’s most performant quantum processor to-date and available in IBM’s global quantum data centers, can now leverage Qiskit to accurately run certain classes of quantum circuits with up to 5,000 two-qubit gate operations. Users can now use these capabilities to expand explorations in how quantum computers can tackle scientific problems across materials, chemistry, life sciences, high-energy physics, and more.”
Equal1’s Quantum Computing Breakthrough with Arm Technology – Arm Newsroom
https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/pushing-quantum-computing-boundaries-with-arm-equal1
(Wednesday, November 13, 2024) “The Ireland-based company has notched another milestone on its journey deeper into the rapidly evolving field of quantum computing. Building on its success as winners of the “Silicon Startups Contest” in 2023, Equal1 has successfully tested the first chip incorporating an Arm Cortex processor at an astonishing temperature of 3.3 Kelvin (-269.85°C). That’s just a few degrees warmer than absolute zero, the theoretical lowest possible temperature where atomic motion nearly stops.”
Quantum computing researchers develop an 8-photon qubit chip
https://phys.org/news/2024-11-quantum-photon-qubit-chip.html
Commentary:
Follow the link in the text or at the bottom of this newsletter to learn more about photonic integrated circuits (PICs).(Thursday, November 14, 2024) “A group of South Korean researchers has successfully developed an integrated quantum circuit chip using photons (light particles). It is a system capable of controlling eight photons using a photonic integrated-circuit chip. With this system, they can explore various quantum phenomena, such as multipartite entanglement resulting from the interaction of the photons.”
Planqc to Build 1000-Qubit Quantum Computer | Business | Nov 2024 | Photonics Spectra
https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Planqc_to_Build_1000-Qubit_Quantum_Computer/p5/a70476
Author: Photonics Media editors
(Thursday, November 14, 2024) “Quantum computing company planqc has been selected to lead a €20 million ($21 million) project to build and deploy a 1000-qubit quantum computer at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Germany. The neutral atom-based quantum computer will be integrated into LRZ’s high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, serving as an accelerator for scientific research and industrial applications.”
Making fault-tolerance a reality: Introducing our QEC decoder toolkit
https://www.quantinuum.com/blog/making-fault-tolerance-a-reality-introducing-our-qec-decoder-toolkit
Author: Quantinuum
Commentary:
Aside from the announcement itself, this blog post gives some nice insight into what must happen quickly and efficiently to perform quantum error correction.(Thursday, November 14, 2024) “We are thrilled to announce a groundbreaking addition to our technology suite: the Quantum Error Correction (QEC) decoder toolkit. This essential tool empowers users to decode syndromes and implement real-time corrections, an essential step towards achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing. As the only company offering this crucial capability to our users, we are paving the way for the future of quantum technology.”
Quantum and AI
Multiverse Computing Launches Singularity Machine Learning Classification Function in IBM’s Qiskit Functions Catalog
“As one of the first third-party services offered within IBM’s Qiskit Functions, Singularity ML is a cloud service that uses quantum machine learning for solving supervised learning problems. These are the best QPU results Multiverse Computing has observed using QML in the literature so far.
Singularity Machine Learning speeds up the development of use case-specific quantum solutions because it easily integrates with standard ML libraries and workflows. This allows users to design custom solutions via Singularity ML without changing current processes.”
Related Articles and Papers
What is a Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) and How Does It Work? | Synopsys
https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-a-photonic-integrated-circuit.html
“A photonic integrated circuit is a chip that could contain hundreds of photonic components, components that works with light (photons).”