Commentary and a selection of the most important recent news, articles, and papers about Quantum.
Today’s Brief Commentary
I’m exhausted from hearing about and discussing the drop in stock prices of quantum companies (and even some that only have “quantum” in their names).
Here is my net: these quantum computing stocks were driven up to unrealistic and unsupportable prices in several weeks. Almost no one said, “Wait, this is not normal or expected. We have a problem.” Instead, they all rejoiced.
Then, the CEO of NVIDIA said that practical quantum computing, versus Quantum Supremacy Version 58, is 15 to 30 years away. The stocks dropped quickly, though they are still sitting well above where they were a month ago as I write this. I think he was too conservative, but he is an intelligent man entitled to his opinion.
Okay, people said, this is a problem. A disaster. Why can one guy do this? Is he mean? Does he have an agenda? Does he know anything about quantum computing? How dare he burst this short-lived bubble. The stock market only behaves rationally; how can this happen? (Laughter in the background.)
When we reach Practical Quantum Computing Advantage, it will be well after we reach Practical Quantum Sensing Advantage and likely Practical Quantum Communications/Networking Advantage. These technologies are more mature.
Quantum atomic clocks have been around for decades, and new work to make them practical is progressing well. The adjacent work in photonics for classical computing will accelerate innovation in sensing and communications. One of my friends is getting an MRI today. This tech has been around for almost 50 years.
If you want something to invest in, look at who works on these technologies and rationally assess their chances of success. Governments are paying for the development of many of these solutions. Of course, don’t ignore quantum computing, but think of it as an investment based on technical and financial fundamentals rather than a follow-the-lemmings gambling exercise.
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Contents
- Earnings Announcements and Financial Dealings
- Quantum Computing | Technical
- Quantum Sensing and Timing
Earnings Announcements and Financial Dealings
IonQ Completes Acquisition of Qubitekk, Solidifying Leadership in Quantum Networking
Date: Monday, January 6, 2025
Excerpt: IonQ has emphasized quantum networking as a strategic priority for scaling its quantum computers, as well as improving the usefulness of quantum computing in general. Its architecture plans to use photonic interconnects to link multiple quantum computers, enabling the creation of a more powerful quantum cluster. Years of investment in advancing this technology for quantum computing have positioned IonQ to make significant strides in quantum networking.
Quantum Computing | Technical
[2407.08828] Benchmarking quantum computers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08828
Authors: Proctor, Timothy; Young, Kevin; Baczewski, Andrew D.; and Blume-Kohout, Robin
Date: Thursday, July 11, 2024
Commentary: This is the arXiv early-access draft of the Nature Reviews Physics paper below, in case you do not have a subscription to the latter.
Excerpt: The rapid pace of development in quantum computing technology has sparked a proliferation of benchmarks for assessing the performance of quantum computing hardware and software. Good benchmarks empower scientists, engineers, programmers, and users to understand a computing system’s power, but bad benchmarks can misdirect research and inhibit progress. In this Perspective, we survey the science of quantum computer benchmarking. We discuss the role of benchmarks and benchmarking, and how good benchmarks can drive and measure progress towards the long-term goal of useful quantum computations, i.e., “quantum utility”. We explain how different kinds of benchmark quantify the performance of different parts of a quantum computer, we survey existing benchmarks, critically discuss recent trends in benchmarking, and highlight important open research questions in this field.
Benchmarking quantum computers | Nature Reviews Physics
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-024-00796-z
Authors: Proctor, Timothy; Young, Kevin; Baczewski, Andrew D.; and Blume-Kohout, Robin
Date: Tuesday, January 7, 2025
Excerpt: Although quantum computers are still in their infancy, their computational power is growing rapidly. This Perspective surveys and critiques the known ways to benchmark quantum computer performance, highlighting new challenges anticipated on the road to utility-scale quantum computing.
[2501.04223] Neutral Atoms in Optical Tweezers as Messenger Qubits for Scaling up a Trapped Ion Quantum Computer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04223
Authors: Kotochigova, Svetlana; Gupta, Subhadeep; and Blinov, Boris
Date: Wednesday, January 8, 2025
Commentary: This appears to be just a proposal rather than a report on an implementation, but it is an interesting combination of modalities. Note that transduction from a trapped ion or neutral atom to a photon for quantum networking is related to this work.
Excerpt: We propose to combine neutral atom and trapped ion qubits in one scalable modular architecture that uses shuttling of individual neutral atoms in optical tweezers to realize atomic interconnects between trapped ion quantum registers. These interconnects are deterministic, and thus may be performed on-demand. The proposed protocol is as follows: a tweezer-trapped neutral atom qubit is brought close to a trapped ion in an ion chain serving as a module of a larger quantum computer, and an entangling gate is performed between the two qubits. Then the neutral atom is quickly moved to another, nearby trapped ion chain in the same modular ion trap and entangled with an ion in that chain, thus entangling the two separate ion chains. The optical dipole potential of the tweezer beam for the neutral atom does not measurably affect the trapped ions, while the RF ion trap does not affect the neutral atom. With realistic tweezer trap parameters, the neutral atom can be moved over millimeter scale distance in a few tens of microseconds, thus enabling a remote entanglement generation rate of over 10^3/s even with very modest assumptions for the atom-ion quantum gate speed, and possibly up to 10^4/s, which is two orders of magnitude higher than the current state-of-the-art with photonic interconnects.
Quantum Sensing and Timing
Troops on military operations to deploy British-made atomic clock for first time | The Telegraph
Author: Danielle Sheridan
Date: Thursday, January 2, 2025
Excerpt: Troops on military operations will soon be able to use a British-made atomic clock built with quantum technology instead of GPS for the first time.
The quantum clock, which in the next five years could be used by troops to tell the time, position, and navigate in hostile environments, will dramatically improve intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance because it decreases the reliance on GPS technology, which can be disrupted and blocked by adversaries
Disclosures
Bob Sutor is a former employee of IBM and Infleqtion and holds equity positions or stock options in each company. He is a Non-Executive Director for Nu Quantum.
