A selection of the most important recent news, articles, and papers about Quantum.
General News, Articles, and Analyses
So you want to build a quantum computer? – Nextgov/FCW
https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2024/09/so-you-want-build-quantum-computer/399478/
Author: Alexandra Kelley
(Thursday, September 12, 2024) “Leading researchers at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois spoke with Nextgov/FCW about the integrative work that bridges the gap between theory and practice, with applications and scalability a distant but feasible goal.”
Who’s News: Management Appointments at Elevate Quantum, SemiQon, QuiX Quantum, SandboxAQ, Nu Quantum, and Moth Quantum
Author: Global Quantum Intelligence
(Thursday, September 12, 2024) “Anjul Loiacono has joined Elevate Quantum as Chief Commercial Officer. In her new role, Dr. Loiacono will work closely with CEO Zachary Yerushalmi and over 150 members to drive the company’s mission of making the Mountain West a hub for quantum technology. …”
China’s Quantum Ambitions May Face Headwinds From Weak Startup Ecosystem
Author: Matt Swayne
(Saturday, September 14, 2024) “China’s impressive quantum research, particularly in quantum communication and sensing, may be undermined by its weakened startup ecosystem.”
IQM Quantum Computers Reaches Production Milestone of 30 Quantum Computers
Author: Matt Swayne
(Monday, September 16, 2024) “IQM Quantum Computers produced 30 full-stack quantum computers in its manufacturing facility in Espoo, Finland.”
Qiskit leads quantum software development kits in performance, testing shows
https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/qiskit-performance
Authors: Paul Nation; David Kremer; Blake Johnson; and Ryan Mandelbaum
(Monday, September 16, 2024) “Today, we’re releasing the results of extensive testing performed by IBM to compare Qiskit against other leading quantum software development kits. These tests benchmark some of the most important tasks for a quantum SDK, which must be feature-complete enough to build and manipulate circuits while transpiling circuits with the best combination of speed and resulting circuit quality. These tests compared Qiskit to BQSKit, Braket, Cirq, Staq, and TKET.”
Announcing the Qiskit Functions Catalog
https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/qiskit-functions-catalog
Authors: Suhare Nur; Tushar Mittal; Jennifer Glick; Sanket Panda; and Ryan Mandelbaum
(Monday, September 16, 2024) “Now, as we embark on a mission to make utility more accessible, we’re launching a platform called the Qiskit Functions Catalog. Using the Qiskit Functions Catalog, developers can release Qiskit Functions that unlock those capabilities for enterprise developers and quantum computational scientists.”
Technical Papers, Articles, and Preprints
[2409.05805] High-fidelity heralded quantum state preparation and measurement
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05805
Authors: Sotirova, A. S.; Leppard, J. D.; Vazquez-Brennan, A.; Decoppet, S. M.; Pokorny, F.; Malinowski, M.; and Ballance, C. J.
(Monday, September 9, 2024) “We present a novel protocol for high-fidelity qubit state preparation and measurement (SPAM) that combines standard SPAM methods with a series of in-sequence measurements to detect and remove errors. The protocol can be applied in any quantum system with a long-lived (metastable) level and a means to detect population outside of this level without coupling to it. We demonstrate the use of the protocol for three different qubit encodings in a single trapped 137Ba+ ion. For all three, we achieve the lowest reported SPAM infidelities of 7(4) × 10-6 (optical qubit), 5(4) × 10-6 (metastable-level qubit), and 8(4) × 10-6 (ground-level qubit).”
New classical algorithm enhances understanding of quantum computing’s future
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-classical-algorithm-quantum-future.html
(Wednesday, September 11, 2024) “In an exciting development for quantum computing, researchers from the University of Chicago’s Department of Computer Science, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and Argonne National Laboratory have introduced a classical algorithm that simulates Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) experiments.”
[2409.08844] Benchmarking the performance of quantum computing software
Authors: Nation, Paul D.; Saki, Abdullah Ash; Brandhofer, Sebastian; Bello, Luciano; Garion, Shelly; Treinish, Matthew; and Javadi-Abhari, Ali
(Friday, September 13, 2024) “We present Benchpress, a benchmarking suite for evaluating the performance and range of functionality of multiple quantum computing software development kits. This suite consists of a collection of over 1000 tests measuring key performance metrics for a wide variety of operations on quantum circuits comprised of up to 930 qubits and O(106) two-qubit gates, as well as an execution framework for running the tests over multiple quantum software packages in a unified manner. We give a detailed overview of the benchmark suite, its methodology, and generate representative results over seven different quantum software packages. The flexibility of the Benchpress framework allows for benchmarking that not only keeps pace with quantum hardware improvements but can preemptively gauge the quantum circuit processing costs of future device architectures. Being open-source, Benchpress ensures the transparency and verification of performance claims.”