Commentary and a selection of the most important recent news, articles, and papers about Quantum.
Today’s Brief Commentary
We’ve entered the end-of-year quantum lull period, though we are between the SC24 conference last week and the Q2B Silicon Valley conference during the second week of December. In the United States, the Thanksgiving holiday is Thursday, and many people also have Friday off. I’m taking Wednesday as personal time off, as I usually do, because I have cooking and baking to finish before the holiday.
Today’s links continue with two themes that have gained steam in the last several months: machine learning techniques to improve quantum computing, and quantum with classical and AI processing within solution workflows. The greater concentration of effort in these two areas shows how the industry is maturing, from point research to combining technologies to solve practical problems.
This is most decidedly not “hybrid”: it’s the natural integration of necessary and varied components and techniques. If you’ve seen my “Why Quantum Needs an Apollo Program” talk, the AI for quantum and workflow efforts show we are now in the early Gemini phase.
Amazon has entered the “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (thanks, John and Paul) business with their Quantum Embark Program. Many professional services companies and vendors have done similar things, with the earliest I can recall starting in 2017. After hooking a client for such advice, help, and education, it can be challenging to keep them returning for more. “Thanks, but I now know everything I need to know at this time” is a common customer sentiment after a few months.
General News, Articles, and Analyses
Quantum Computer Park Clears Key Hurdle on Chicago’s South Side With Plan Commission Vote | Quantum Insider
Author: Matt Swayne
(Saturday, November 23, 2024) “The Chicago Plan Commission approved the creation of a quantum computing research park on the long-vacant U.S. Steel South Works site, advancing a project with the intention to transform the South Side into a national technology hub, as reported in the Chicago Tribune.”
Company Earnings and Financial Announcements
Quantum in Context: D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti 3Q2024 Financial Results
Author: Dr. Bob Sutor
(Thursday, November 21, 2024) “Three quantum computing companies—IonQ, D-Wave Quantum, and Rigetti Computing—have gone public via SPACs since 2021. With several years of financial reports available, we can now more critically examine their revenue growth and net losses.”
Quantum Computing
NVIDIA Accelerates Google Quantum AI Processor Design With Simulation of Quantum Device Physics | NVIDIA Newsroom
(Monday, November 18, 2024) “Google Quantum AI is using the hybrid quantum-classical computing platform and the NVIDIA Eos supercomputer to simulate the physics of its quantum processors. This will help overcome the current limitations of quantum computing hardware, which can only run a certain number of quantum operations before computations must cease, due to what researchers call “noise.””
Announcing the Launch of Quantinuum Nexus: Our All-in-One Quantum Computing Platform
(Tuesday, November 19, 2024) “Designed to provide an exceptional experience for managing, storing, and executing quantum workflows, Nexus offers unparalleled integration with Quantinuum’s software and hardware.”
IBM and Pasqal Plan to Expand Quantum-Centric Supercomputing Initiative
Commentary:
‘Workflow’ is the key word in this announcement. Are they planning a frontal assault on NVIDIA‘s CUDA-Q?(Thursday, November 21, 2024) “As part of intended quantum-centric supercomputing collaboration between Pasqal and IBM, unified programming model built on Qiskit will aim to integrate various quantum and classical hardware resources for advanced HPC workflows.”
AWS announces the Quantum Embark Program to help customers get ready for quantum computing | AWS Quantum Technologies Blog
Authors: Tyler Takeshita; Daniela Becker; Pavel Lougovski; and Stefan Natu
(Friday, November 22, 2024) “Today, we’re introducing Quantum Embark, a new advisory program for customers. Quantum Embark aims to help customers get ready for quantum computing by providing an expert-led approach, as they embark on their journey. With Embark, there are no long-term commitments, and customers can get started in as little as a few weeks.”
Quantum Computing – Technical
Phys. Rev. X 14, 041050 (2024) | Realization of High-Fidelity CZ Gate Based on a Double-Transmon Coupler
https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.14.041050
Authors: Rui Li; Kentaro Kubo; Yinghao Ho; Zhiguang Yan; Yasunobu Nakamura; and Hayato Goto
(Thursday, November 21, 2024) “The first realization of an innovative—but until now, only theoretical—way to couple transmon-based qubits provides high fidelity in quantum gates, paving the way for a novel building block for superconducting quantum processors.”
Quantum error correction research yields unexpected quantum gravity insights – Physics World
Author: Han Le
(Thursday, November 21, 2024) “A more surprising connection, though, concerns one of the deepest questions in modern physics: how do we reconcile quantum mechanics with Einstein’s general theory of relativity? While quantum mechanics governs the behavior of particles at the smallest scales, general relativity accounts for gravity and space-time on a cosmic scale. These two pillars of modern physics have some incompatible intersections, creating challenges when applying quantum mechanics to strongly gravitational systems.”
AI for Quantum
AlphaQubit: Google’s research on quantum error correction
https://blog.google/technology/google-deepmind/alphaqubit-quantum-error-correction/
(Wednesday, November 20, 2024) “In a paper published today in Nature, we introduce AlphaQubit, an AI-based decoder that identifies quantum computing errors with state-of-the-art accuracy. This collaborative work brought together Google DeepMind’s machine learning knowledge and Google Quantum AI’s error correction expertise to accelerate progress on building a reliable quantum computer.”
Learning high-accuracy error decoding for quantum processors | Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08148-8
Authors: Bausch, Johannes; Senior, Andrew W.; Heras, Francisco J. H.; Edlich, Thomas; Davies, Alex; Newman, Michael; Jones, Cody; Satzinger, Kevin; Niu, Murphy Yuezhen; ; …; and Kohli, Pushmeet
Commentary:
This is the research article about Google DeepMind‘s AlphaQubit.(Wednesday, November 20, 2024) “A recurrent, transformer-based neural network, called AlphaQubit, learns high-accuracy error decoding to suppress the errors that occur in quantum systems, opening the prospect of using neural-network decoders for real quantum hardware.”
Machine learning for practical quantum error mitigation | Nature Machine Intelligence
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-024-00927-2
Authors: Liao, Haoran; Wang, Derek S.; Sitdikov, Iskandar; Salcedo, Ciro; Seif, Alireza; and Minev, Zlatko K.
(Friday, November 22, 2024) “Quantum error mitigation improves the accuracy of quantum computers at a computational overhead. Liao et al. demonstrate that classical machine learning models can deliver accuracy comparable to that of conventional techniques while reducing quantum computational costs.”
