Commentary and a selection of the most important recent news, articles, and papers about Quantum.
Today’s Brief Commentary
I tweaked today’s edition’s title to insert the word “useful.” After all, we want our computing systems, classical or quantum, to be useful, don’t we? Most of today’s quantum computers are deployed for research, experimentation, and education. They are not yet used in production, but we are seeing signs that the technology is advancing. Some of these involve fault tolerance/error correction, and others involve quantum networking.
We can’t run long enough computations if noise and errors overtake the processes. We need quantum networking to connect small quantum processing units (QPUs) and create large enough systems to achieve Practical Quantum Advantage. Without these two, we will be left with toy systems solving toy problems.
Look at the achievements of researchers and vendors, but keep an eye on their roadmaps. Demand more uniformity in how they state their milestones and metrics. Logical qubits? How do they define those? Logical operations? How many and how fast?
General News, Articles, and Analyses
Quantum Computers Expected to Be Useful by 2026, Survey | IoT World Today
https://www.iotworldtoday.com/quantum/quantum-computers-expected-to-be-useful-by-2026-survey
Author: Berenice Baker
Commentary:
So, they are useless today? Not much of a marketing slogan!(Tuesday, October 22, 2024) “Quantum computing vendors believe 2026-27 will mark a key inflection point for the industry when the technology will start delivering useful results for customers, a new survey has found.”
Nord Quantique Secures Key Partnerships for Quantum Chip Supply Chain
Commentary:
It’s good to see these business relationships crossing the Canada-US border, especially between the quantum powerhouse that is Sherbrooke, Québec, and New York State.(Wednesday, October 23, 2024) “Nord Quantique, a leader in the field of quantum error correction, today announced two new partnerships to secure its long-term chip fabrication supply chain for quantum computers.”
Quantum Error Correction Report 2024 | Riverlane
https://www.riverlane.com/quantum-error-correction-report-2024
Commentary:
While Riverlane’s main product is, well, quantum error correction, this report, prepared with Resonance, provides an excellent overview of the state of the field and implementations, with third-party validation. I might temper the enthusiasm for NISQ ending really soon and the large-scale QEC era beginning, but it’s a fine piece of work of great value to the industry. Kudos.“Significant progress has been made over the last two decades in scaling quantum computers by improving the quality and quantity of qubits. We are entering a new era where quantum computers will unlock applications that are intractable on today’s most powerful supercomputers within the next two to three years. At the heart of this shift is quantum error correction (QEC). The Quantum Error Correction Report 2024 outlines the current state of QEC development, providing valuable insights into quantum computing’s current defining challenge”
Post-Quantum Cryptography and Security
Why the new NIST standards mean quantum cryptography may just have come of age | World Economic Forum
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/10/quantum-cryptography-nist-standards/
Authors: Colin Soutar; Itan Barmes; and Filipe Beato
(Tuesday, October 22, 2024) “Quantum computing creates enormous economic and scientific opportunities, given its ability to significantly boost computing power. However, quantum computing – which employs quantum mechanics to solve some complex computing problems – can also render some of the current encryption algorithms obsolete, posing serious cybersecurity risks.”
Technical Papers, Articles, and Preprints
[2410.12963] Single-shot and measurement-based quantum error correction via fault complexes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12963
Authors: Hillmann, Timo; Dauphinais, Guillaume; Tzitrin, Ilan; and Vasmer, Michael
(Wednesday, October 16, 2024) “Photonics provides a viable path to a scalable fault-tolerant quantum computer. The natural framework for this platform is measurement-based quantum computation, where fault-tolerant graph states supersede traditional quantum error-correcting codes. However, the existing formalism for foliation – the construction of fault-tolerant graph states – does not reveal how certain properties, such as single-shot error correction, manifest in the measurement-based setting. We introduce the fault complex, a representation of dynamic quantum error correction protocols particularly well-suited to describe foliation. Our approach enables precise computation of fault tolerance properties of foliated codes and provides insights into circuit-based quantum computation. Analyzing the fault complex leads to improved thresholds for three- and four-dimensional toric codes, a generalization of stability experiments, and the existence of single-shot lattice surgery with higher-dimensional topological codes.”
Physics – Quantum Computing with a Twist
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v17/s129
Author: Ryan Wilkinson
(Thursday, October 17, 2024) “The prediction that twisted semiconductor bilayers can host so-called non-Abelian states without a magnetic field holds promise for fault-tolerant quantum computing.”
Related Articles and Papers
Quantum in Context: A Qubit Primer – The Futurum Group
https://futurumgroup.com/insights/quantum-in-context-a-qubit-primer/
Author: Dr. Bob Sutor
“This article introduces the key ideas and concepts of Qubits, the physical instantiation of the units of information in quantum computers.”