News Brief

Credit: Quantinuum, BMW, Airbus, Aerostack from arXiv 2307.15823v1 As aircraft and auto companies research new technologies for creating low carbon emitting vehicles, an electric engine powered by a hydrogen fuel cell is considered a promising candidate. A leading approach uses an Oxidation Reduction Reaction (ORR) that passes hydrogen through a proton-exchange fuel cell (PEMFC) membrane that is coated with platinum or some other material as a catalyst. An important design choice to optimize the efficiency of the PEMFC is to choose the best material for use as the catalyst. This is where a quantum computer's chemical modelling capabilities can be used. [...]

PlanQK is a consortium supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate that was created to develop a platform and an ecosystem for quantum applications. It consists of 19 partners and 84 associate partners from industry and the research communities. It consists of a serverless quantum platform, a quantum knowledge platform, a quantum marketplace, and an expert community. Q.ANT is a quantum hardware startup based in Stuttgart, Germany formed in 2018 as part of the TRUMPF group. Q.ANT has joined PlanQK to contribute their knowledge of photonic based quantum hardware and to provide manufacture capabilities for quantum chips [...]

These two multi-year projects will be performed by D-Wave Quantum Inc. and the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo. The projects were funded by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Quantum Alliance program and will research ways to improve both device design and materials quantum for improving coherence in superconducting qubits. By taking steps to improve coherence times, it will provide for more accurate quantum calculations with fewer errors for algorithms running on a quantum processor. A press release announcing these new collaborations has been posted on the D-Wave website and can [...]

Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) and Cogniframe have announced that OQC quantum processor is being added to the FirstQ plug-and-play application store. The OQC processor will be joining Toshiba's Simulated Bifurcation Machine (SBM) and Cogniframe's own gate level simulator as execution backends for problems submitted to FirstQ. The FirstQ software provides support for end users to submit problems either as a gate level circuit or as an Ising model or as a pre-curated hybrid and quantum-only use case via the desktop app. The problem will be compiled and optimized to run on the OQC hardware and then executed on the machine. Because [...]

One of the most promising areas for the usage of quantum computers is for various financial problems. One advantage for financial applications is that a successful algorithm could be deployed in production very rapidly. Other types of applications, such as drug or materials discovery, may take much longer to be put into production either due to requirements for additional testing, field trials, or integration with an existing IT infrastructure and training requirements within an enterprise. For this project, Rigetti Computing will be working with ADIA Lab, an independent Abu Dhabi-based laboratory dedicated to basic and applied research in data and computational [...]

We reported last week that the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) had established a Quantum Computing Commercialisation Fund (QCCF) with a budget of $7 million AUS to encourage quantum research and development, as well as jobs, within Australia. We also indicated that Diraq had received a $3 million grant from that fund to continue its research on silicon spin based qubits. Now two additional grants have been made public from this fund. The first additional grant is to Quantum Brilliance which will receive $1.44 million AUD for development and commercialization of its room temperature NV Diamond based quantum accelerators. The [...]

The hackathon being organized by the PASQAL company and an advisory firm called Blaise Pasqal Advisors is called the The Blaise Pascal [re]Generative Quantum Challenge. It will run in multiple phases from October 5, 2023 to November 10, 2023 and will conclude with a virtual demo day scheduled for November 15, 2023 and an awards ceremony on November 28, 2023. The object will be for each team to pick a a use case related to environmental, social, human, or economic issues and show how quantum computing can provide a solution for it. The total prize fund will be €50,000 split into [...]

Diagram of SemiQon-Qblox Based Quantum Processor The funds are being provided by the European Innovation Council through their Transition funding program to SemiQon and Qblox for a 30 month duration program called SCALLOP to integrate Qblox' control electronics hardware with SemiQon's quantum dot based qubit technology. The team's goals in this project include improving qubit quality and reducing the need for cooling by implementing low-charge-noise quantum dots and monolithically integrating a cryo-CMOS multiplexer. The work on this progeram will be carried out at SemiQon's headquarters in Espoo, Finland as well as Qblox' headquarters in Delft, Netherlands. Additional details about this program can [...]

In a Form D filing earlier this month with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Zapata Computing it has received to date $4,857,000 million in either a loan or option or warrant financing. This is different from their previous fund raises with venture capital companies that received equity in the company in exchange for their funds. Overall, the company is seeking to raise up to $20 million with this financing instrument. Additional details of this latest transaction have not yet been made public. The company has most recently been emphasizing its work in Generative AI and is no longer solely [...]

In January, we had reported that Q-CTRL had raised $27.4 million in a Series B-1 venture funding bringing the total amount they had raised to $52 million. And today they have announced the additional of Morpheus Ventures as an additional investor in their Series B bringing the total amount raised to $54 million. Morpheus invests in early stage companies and is based in Los Angeles. Previously, Morepheus had invested in Rigetti Computing in the quantum space. Included in the announcement of this new investor, Q-CTRL mentioned that they achieved a cash-flow positive financial results for the first half of 2023. This [...]