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By Dr. Andre Saraiva, UNSW The achievements of Chinese academic Jianwei Pan have earned him the nickname of “Father of Quantum” in the Chinese scientific community. His success history recently culminated in the first quantum satellite, which distributes entangled photons between ground and an orbit thousands of kilometres high. His reputation explains why the scientific community got so hastily excited when rumours spread about his 50-photon boson sampling quantum computer, which would potentially outperform Google’s Sycamore quantum processor in a quantum supremacy experiment. The English-language publication South China Morning Post reported that Jianwei Pan “announced at a lecture at Westlake University, [...]

A few years ago, researchers in the quantum physics era would have discussions on whether quantum computing would ever do anything useful at all.  (See here, here, and here).  People would argue that the qubits are much too unstable and the challenges of getting them to behave and building them in large quantities was just too difficult to ever do any commercially relevant. However, in more recent years, the attitude has changed as we wrote in an article in 2017. And progress over the last three years has further confirmed that there is a future in quantum computing and it will [...]

As part of this initiative, IBM will establish the IBM-HBCU Quantum Center which will offer access to its quantum computers, as well as collaborate on academic, education, and community outreach programs. This effort will enable students to learn how to use the Qiskit open source software development framework, and also provide funding for undergraduate and graduate research.  The will help increase the number of Black students educated in Quantum Information Science and Engineering (QISE), while also strengthening faculty QISE research efforts at HBCUs. Institutions that will participate in the IBM-HBCU Quantum Center include Albany State University, Clark Atlanta University, Coppin State University, Hampton University, Howard [...]

One of the oldest and still most important concept in classical computing software is the IF statement. This statement allows a program to inspect the value of a variable and then take different courses of action depending upon the result. Up until recently, the available quantum computers did not have the capability of supporting conditional execution.  So none of the existing quantum computing algorithms (Shor’s, Grover’s, Phase Estimation, QFT, VQE, QAOA, etc.) use anything like an IF statement.  Once you set up your circuit, the computer executes it straight through without any deviations or changes.  Once that circuit fully completes, you [...]

Michel Kurek, a French finance professional with 25+ years of experience in the sector, has recently performed extensive research on quantum patents, publications, and investments as part of his studies for an Executive Master at the École Polytechnique. He has published an extensive 52 page report titled Quantum Technologies Patents, Publications & Investment. It uses sources including Pitchbook, Crunchbase, the Quantum Computing Report, Orbit, Global Risk Institute, and others to provide detailed data bases in three important areas: Patent Landscape for Quantum TechnologiesGlobal Publications Related to Research in Quantum Computing for the Period 2010-2020Global Public and Private Investment Landscape The report [...]

In what might be the first publicly announced application which exhibits Quantum Advantage, Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) and IBM has announced a software application for their IBM Q Network that will provide verifiable quantum random number generation on demand.  This service will be available at no additional charge to the 100+ organizations that are members of the IBM Q Network. Besides the ability to use a real quantum computer, another unique aspect of this service is that it includes a verification process using a Bell test based upon Mermin inequalities so that a user can be sure of the true quantum [...]

IBM has described a quantum computing roadmap that incorporates a number of advancements in future machines that include innovations at the chip, electrical, mechanical, and software technology levels. The goal is to not only improvement the number of qubits in the machines, but also improve the qubit quality metrics so that meaningful error correction algorithms can be implemented in future machines. Like many engineering projects in technology companies, IBM is using codenames to identify the developments and has decided to use names of birds for this one.  The recently announced Hummingbird development came online on September 1, 2020 and is based [...]

By Dr. Andre Saraiva, UNSW Measuring electric currents through a specially designed semiconductor device, researchers from the Manfra group at Purdue University measured directly an important topological quantity: the braiding statistics of anyons. This is a long sought-after scientific milestone for demonstrating the principles behind topological quantum computers. What are anyons? Well, make yourself a cup of tea, because this might take a minute.   While all materials are made from the same subatomic particles – protons, neutrons and electrons – these particles can swarm together and act collectively as a new effective particle, called quasiparticle. Traditionally, both fundamental particles and quasiparticles will get their wavefunction affected when they are swapped around each other, either changing their sign or remaining unchanged. The former are called fermions (electrons, protons and neutrons are fermions), while the latter are called bosons (photons, phonons, excitons, etc).  Anyons are exotic quasiparticles that gain some arbitrary complex phase when they are swapped. Well, [...]

The Quantum Computing Report is expanding our coverage to include deeper coverage of new technical developments in quantum technology. This section, Qnalysis (short for Quantum Technology Analysis), will include our reviews of new technical announcements and papers and include assessments of how they might impact the industry. September 21, 2020Heresay Around Chinese Quantum Supremacy September 17, 2020The IF Statement Comes to Quantum Computing September 11, 2020Breakthrough for Topological States and What That Means for Quantum Computing September 6, 2020Dressed to Impress: UChicago Team Tricks Qubits into Living 10,000 Times Longer September 6, 2020Meet the Kerr-cat States: An Error-Resistant Solid-State Qubit

By Dr. Andre Saraiva, UNSW In the war against quantum errors, it is important to pick your battles. Noise can cause all sorts of complicated multiqubit errors, but it is often the mundane phase flip of a single qubit that causes most trouble. This means that locally the qubits can flip erratically, but the collective properties of a large group of qubits remain intact. That is the idea behind quantum error correction – encoding logical qubits in many physical qubits, creating redundancy in the information. The group of Professor Michel Devoret, from Yale University, took a completely different direction, experimentally showing [...]