dougfinke

At the Quantum World Congress event, Quantinuum has unveiled its quantum processor development roadmap, with a goal of providing systems that can provide users with a quantum advantage in the next few years. Their roadmap builds upon the continued progress they have made with the H1 and H2 generations of processors and the roadmap extends for three more generations through 2029. Quantinuum has a demonstrated track record over several years of continuing to increase qubit count and qubit fidelity starting with the original H0 processor introduced in 2019. Going forward, they are building upon the latest results of their 56 qubit [...]

Rendering of a Q4S Satellite Containing Entanglement Swapping Device. Credit:Boeing One of the key components that will be needed in a future quantum internet is a device that performs a process known as entanglement swapping. This is a device can start with two pairs of entangled photons and swaps the entanglement such that a photon from the first pair becomes entangled with a photon from the second pair. As an example, in the diagram below, the process starts with Photon 1 entangled with Photon 2 and also Photon 3 entangled with Photon 4. By performing a Bell State Measurement between Photons [...]

At this week's Quantum World Congress, Microsoft made three announcement on advancements and developments in their quantum program. The first is continued advancement in its error correction research in partnership with Quantinuum. In April, we reported that this team has created a circuit that creates four logical qubits from 30 physical qubits on Quantinuum’s H2 processor. Now they have implemented a [16,4,4] tesseract code that is more efficient an can encode four logical qubits with only 16 physical qubits. They have leveraged this code to demonstrate three different circuits that implement 4 logical qubits on Quantinuum's 20 qubit H1 processor and [...]

by Amara Graps The BB84 protocol In 1984, Brassard and Bennett presented their 4-page, conference paper,  which described the BB84 algorithm, thus fixing in history the first quantum cryptography protocol for the Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) concept. The BB84 algorithm is still in-use today. See BB84’s roots to physics principles in the first words of their Abstract: When elementary quantum systems, such as polarized photons, are used to transmit digital information, the uncertainty principle gives rise to novel cryptographic phenomena unachievable with traditional transmission media […]  --Brassard and Bennett Given that QKD distributes cryptographic keys produced by quantum techniques across terrestrial and [...]

D-Wave Quantum Inc., a leading provider of quantum computing systems, software, and services, has joined the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE) as a corporate partner. This collaboration aims to advance quantum education and industry adoption efforts. D-Wave, which serves various industries by solving complex computational problems in optimization, research, and artificial intelligence, plans to engage with the CQE community on materials science research, quantum education, and practical optimization use cases for manufacturing and logistics. David Awschalom, a professor at the University of Chicago and director of the CQE, emphasized the potential of quantum computing to address significant societal challenges and the importance [...]

by Amara Graps What Will Be Quantum Technology’s First ‘Killer App’? Quantum researchers have addressed this question since 2019 in their research articles, in a variety of (sometimes surprising) ways. O'Brien et al., 2019 proposed the answer was quantum chemistry with a focus on the FeMoco molecule, while von Burg et al., 2021 agreed that quantum chemistry, in particular, the calculation of quantum electronic energies in molecular systems, was the killer application. Lau et al., 2022 pondered the question, but didn’t have an answer. Instead, they offered a comparison timeline for classical computers to demonstrate their effectiveness, including the period when [...]

By Amara Graps The most astonishing feature of the quantum computing field to newcomers is the variety of methods (‘modalities’) to make a qubit. With the state-of-the-art today, what evidence, if any, is there for particular applications that are better suited to particular quantum computing modalities? GQI’s Doug Finke says in a recent Laser Focus article : We aren’t at the point yet where we can definitely say which quantum applications will be able to provide commercially useful results on which machines. But the one thing that makes us optimistic is the diversity of innovative approaches and rapid advances organizations are [...]

By Amara Graps 45+ years ago, the availability of Apple I, II, Commodore, Kim and other personal computers, inspired a generation of hobbyists, who relished accessing the computer’s 6502 chip. I worked in a group at NASA-Ames, where we kept a half-dozen extra Apple IIs for parts to maintain the operations of our ‘portable’ infrared astronomy, data-acquisition system. One (left in this team photo) of the astronomy team members wrote the code closest to the Apple II’s hardware, which was in 6502 assembly-language; code that looked similar to this. 6502-Hobbyists should not throw out their old Apple II 6502 Assembly Language [...]

Although many organizations will be able to implement the new NIST PQC algorithms in software using their existing computers, other applications, particularly small IoT (Internet of Things) devices may need a dedicated chip for this function because their IoT device doesn't have the performance to process the PQC algorithms along with the other things it is doing. And other organizations may want to develop an SoC (System on a Chip) device that integrates the PQC processing functionality along with other functions on a single piece of silicon. For those applications, PQShield has developed an initial test chip that implements the first [...]