dougfinke

The exercise was to perform an optimized placement of vehicle sensors as part of a Quantum Computing Challenge sponsored by BMW and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The problem required optimizing the placement of sensors on automobiles to reach the highest coverage at the minimum cost and the problem was configured as an optimization problem that included 3,854 variables and 500 constraints. Quantum Computing Inc. (QCI) had previously provided a solution last year using a D-Wave quantum annealer and a Variational Analog Quantum Oracle (VAQO) approach that required over 7 hours of D-Wave runtime and several hundred sensors. But the breakthrough in [...]

By Chris Mansell Hardware  Title: Suppressing quantum errors by scaling a surface code logical qubitOrganization: GoogleThe ultimate goal of quantum error correction is to create a fault-tolerant quantum computer. For this to happen, the error correcting mechanisms, which themselves are subject to the occasional error, must cross a threshold where they correct more errors than they introduce.  The surface code is designed to make several noisy physical qubits behave as a single, less noisy, so-called logical qubit. In some impressive new research, superconducting qubits are put into groups of either 9 or 25 in order to test whether the whole is less [...]

Original Quantum is a startup headquartered in Hefei, China and founded in 2017 by a team from the quantum information laboratory at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The company is believe to have over 300 employees with about 75% of them R&D personnel. They have been developing quantum processors based upon both superconducting and spin qubit technologies and have also developed a quantum computing software framework called Qpanda2 to build, run and optimize quantum algorithms along with a quantum operating system called Origin Pilot. They received a Series A funding of over 100 Million Yuan ($15.4M USD) in January 2021 and [...]

The University of Chicago in association with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is offering a seven week on-line course to prepare prepares students to enter the quantum field with demonstrations, simulations, and technical hands-on experience. It is geared towards early-career individuals ten years or less of professional experience and a bachelor’s or graduate degree in the sciences such as physics, computer science, engineering, or math as well as mid-career professionals seeking to transition into the quantum field. The course will consist of on-line evening lectures twice a week for seven weeks and self-paced modules to teach the student the theoretical and [...]

Google held its Quantum Summer Symposium last week and described a number of new developments that shows they are continuing to progress in their quantum developments. They first announced of a free program called the Quantum Virtual Machine (QVM) that runs in a Colab notebook. Although Google has not made any of their quantum processors openly available to the public yet, the QVM allows anyone to emulate one of Google's processors to test out their programs and see how they would run run on one of their quantum machines. Although there are many other quantum simulators out there, the key differentiator [...]

The funding was led by World Fund with additional participation from Bayern Kapital, EIC Fund, OurCrowd, QCI SPV, Tofino and Varma, as well as existing investors Maki.vc, Matadero QED, MIG Fonds, OpenOcean, Salvia GmbH, Santo Venture Capital GmbH, Tencent, Tesi, and Vsquared. IQM is building superconducting based quantum processors, but has taken a different commercialization strategy than some of the other hardware providers. Rather than concentrating on providing cloud based systems that can be openly accessed over the internet, they are concentrating on providing on-premise, full-stack processors that can be installed at research laboratories and supercomputing centers. They are also taking [...]

One of the key engineering activities to achieve qubits that have the longest coherence times is materials engineering to produce purified substances that will help reduce the impact of things that will degrade the coherence time of a qubit. For spin qubit technologies a key material that is important is the starting silicon wafer upon which the qubit structures are built. Natural Silicon consists of three isotopes including Si-28 (92.2%) which has zero nuclear spin, Si-29 (4.7%) which has a spin state of 1/2, and Si-30 (3.1%) which has also has zero spin. Natural silicon is perfectly fine for semiconductor processing [...]