dougfinke

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 [...]

The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) published a study rating possible attacks against Quantum Key Distribution QKD systems in a comprehensive study (in English) reviewing over 300 relevant research papers. They found 49 possible attack paths and 9 vulnerabilities with a total of 18 potential counter-measures. The complexity of executing most of these falls into the category "moderate" (26), meaning a real possible threat, with 13 in "high" and the rest in "basic" and "beyond high". The main contributors (out of factors such as time, money, expertise, equipment needed) to these ratings are the facts that in most cases, an expertise ranging [...]

InfleqtionInfleqtion has issued a press release announcing the addition of a new Senior Vice-President of Business Development, a Chief Marketing Officer, a Global Vice-President of Manufacturing, and three additional members to its Board of Directors. Brent Schwarz has joined the company as SVP of Business Development responsible for driving enterprise adoption of Infleqtion's technologies. Previously, he held positions at Luminar Technologies, a company providing LIDAR sensors and has other experience at Uber Advanced Technologies Group, Otto, Tyto LIDAR, Velodyne LIDAR, Magellan Navigation, and Intel. Julie McGee is now the Chief Marketing Officer responsible for global brands, go-to-market strategy, and strategic communications. [...]

Conceptual Diagram of How Magic State Distillation can Start with a Very Noisy State and Run It Through Multiple Rounds of Distillation to End Up with a Near Perfect State. Credit: IBM With all the ongoing research into error correction for fault tolerant computers, one thing that hasn't be achieved yet is to demonstrate error correction that works with a universal gate set. If one can implement a universal gate set, then, at least theoretically, a quantum computer can process any quantum algorithm that is available. Much of the research so far has only worked with a limited set of quantum [...]

Coming on the heels of the announcement last month that Harvard, MIT, QuEra and others were able to demonstrate a system with up to 48 logical qubits (see our articles here and here), QuEra has announced a roadmap for the next three years that will work to leverage this research along with experience fielding its Aquila 256 qubit analog quantum processor that takes the next steps to go beyond this milestone. QuEra's will work to commercialize the fault tolerant technology to make it available to end users. The company has created a three year roadmap with specific milestones for each year. [...]

Chinese QC startup Origin Quantum Computing has announced that it has put its 72 qubit superconducting processor named Origin Wukong on-line and is offering free access until February 6, 2024. This machine contains 72 computational qubits and also include 126 couplers between the qubits to provide higher qubit fidelity. This third generation processor follows earlier developments of 6 qubit and 24 qubit devices that Origin had developed over the past few years. Besides the number of qubits in the machine, the only other technical detail we currently see are the T1 and T2 times of 15.22 and 2.23 microseconds, respectively. Average [...]

We had reported in November who Alibaba had decided to shut down its quantum research team and donate the remaining equipment to Zhejiang University. And at that time, we cautioned that we could see more of this. Now, Baidu has announced that it is donating a quantum computing laboratory and equipment to the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences (BAQIS). The parties are still working out the details and it is not known if the researchers who were working on Baidu's quantum research will also join BAQIS or stay with Alibaba or go elsewhere. The company did not state why it [...]