dougfinke

Infleqtion announced today that it has acquired both SiNoptiq Inc. and Morton Photonics Inc. Both companies work in the area of photonics. SiNoptiq has developed a ultra-low loss silicon nitride platform while Morton Photonics develops advanced silicon photonics-based component and sub-system technologies. These products can have significant use in quantum sensors, quantum networks, and quantum computers. SiNoptiq is located in Santa Barbara, California and was founded in December 2022. Morton Photonics was formed in 2002 and has locations in Palm Bay, Florida and Santa Barbara, California. In addition to the product lines and the people from these companies, Infleqtion will also be acquiring [...]

Side view of IonQ Forte EGT (evaporated glass ion trap chip). Credit: IonQ) IonQ has improved the performance of their Forte processor from #AQ29 ro #AQ35. IonQ's #AQ performance metric is based upon work performed by the QED-C to develop a quantum performance benchmark. As can be seen in the picture below the improvement allowed the machine to run larger versions of the Phase Estimation and Hamiltonian Simulation test with an increase of six qubits from 29 to 35. Although that may not seem very large, it represents an increase in the number of potential quantum states by a factor of 64. Comparison [...]

Sample of a Few Materials from Phasecraft's Materials Quantum Modeling Complexity Database One of the most promising areas for near-term commercial application of quantum computing is in the area of materials modeling for discovering new materials and drugs. Applications in this area may only require a few thousand qubits as opposed to the millions of qubits needed for other applications. Progress in reaching this goal is coming from two fronts. The first is the continued improvement in hardware capabilities as we report frequently in these pages. But the other is progress in creating better algorithms that can perform the needed computation [...]

A very important ratio for fault tolerant quantum computers is the Physical-to-Logical ratio. The represents the number of physical qubits needed to implement a logical qubit. The lower this ratio is, the better because it makes it easier to implement in hardware, reduces the cost of the machine, and many other things. The problem is that with many of the quantum error correction codes that have been developed, the number is quite high. It could be 1000:1 or even higher. One of the reasons quantum error correction is harder than classical error correction is that many quantum processors can suffer from [...]

Microsoft has made a major rewrite of their Azure Quantum Development Kit (QDK) to make it 100X faster, 100X smaller, and able to run in a browser. The new version has just been released as the Azure Quantum Development Kit 1.0. The key change driving the improvements is that the internal code base was converted to the Rust programming language known for its higher efficiency in runtime and memory usage. It also includes a new of new or improved features such as full IntelliSense support which is a code completion aid that makes coding more convenient, built-in quantum simulation and debugging, [...]

For much the same reason that the U.S. Department of Defense is closely looking at how quantum technology can impact their activities, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has decided to also create programs that will enhance innovation and utilization in quantum technologies within all the NATO Allies. For defense purposes quantum impact can potentially have significant impact in areas including sensing, imaging, precise positioning, navigation and timing, improve the detection of submarines, and quantum safe cryptography. But quantum technology is also dual-use and potentially has many potential uses in applications such as climate change, human health, economics, and many other areas. The [...]

Quantinuum has announced it has raised $300 million in a new investment brining the total capital raised by the company to about $625 million with a pre-money valuation of $5 billion. The investors included JPMorgan Chase, Mitsui & Co., Amgen and Honeywell who have all worked with the company for many years. The company believes that this will be the last private fund-raising that would be needed before an eventual IPO. Quantinuum was formed in 2021 as a spinoff of the Honeywell Quantum Solutions group that merged with Cambridge Quantum Computing in the UK to form a quantum tech company that [...]