News Brief

Google's $50 million investment will cover one-half of an overall $100 million, 10 year program during which the team will be researching fault tolerant quantum computing as well as supporting workforce development, fostering quantum entrepreneurship, and exchange of researchers and ideas. Google's contribution will including access to their latest quantum processor, access to classical computing resources in the Google Cloud, faculty research grants, graduate and undergraduate research funding, workforce development, and support for startup teams from the greater Chicago and Tokyo areas to participate in the Google for Startups bootcamp. Additional information is available in a blog post on the Google [...]

The NSF Engines Development Awards program was authorized last year in the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act and is a program designed to turn cutting-edge research into new technologies that create jobs and promote economic growth. The NSF has just announced two planning awards of $1 million each for development of quantum technology and an ecosystem in two U.S. geographic region. The first was made to the University of Connecticut to develop a to formal proposal to establish Connecticut as a regional hub for quantum-related research, technologies, and jobs. The second planning grant was made to Montana State University for similar [...]

Last August we had reported that the latest public available generation of IonQ quantum processor, named Aria, was being made available on Microsoft Azure. IonQ has now announced that Aria will also be available on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It will join a previous generation Harmony processor and become the second IonQ machine available on AWS. The current machine has a number of improvements and provides a quality metric #AQ (Algorithmic Qubits) of 25. IonQ has published two blog posts providing additional technical details on the Aria. You can view Part 1 here and Part 2 of the blog here. A [...]

Sparrow Quantum, located in Copenhagen Denmark, is provider of single-photon components for quantum applications and technologies. The company is a as a spin-off from the Niels Bohr Institute’s Quantum Photonics Lab in Copenhagen, Denmark. The funding, which is the largest so far in a Danish quantum company, was led by the venture capital firm 2xN with additional participation from LIFTT and the European Innovation Council (EIC). The current product is a high performance single photon source that can generate photon streams at a rate of 20 million per second. These are created by a 3mm x 3mm InAs/GaAS chip that has quantum dot structures embedded in photonic [...]

Zapata and L3Harris are leading a team that is receiving $7.3 million from the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) to develop benchmarks to enable measuring progress of a quantum computer to solve specific sets of challenges. Other members of the team include BBVA Corporation, BP, Copernic Catalysts, Mitsubishi Chemical and the University of Toronto. The 30 scenarios they have drawn up include real-world problems involving new materials, simulating fluid dynamics, real-time machine learning, and engineering design optimization which can be applicable to widely diverse industry including defense, chemistry, finance, machine learning and others. These scenarios will allow researchers to benchmark and [...]

The funding came from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) Quantum Sensors Challenge program. Toronto based Quantum Bridge is developing a all-photonic quantum repeater that will help enable quantum entanglement to be communicated over long distances in a fiber optic cable. Currently, the limitation for long distance quantum communication is the signal degradation that photons incur when travelling through a fiber optic cable. In classical communications, telecom companies use classical photonic repeaters which can measure a signal and then repeat it to the next link in the chain. However, those classical devices do not work in quantum due to fundamental [...]

Quantum Brilliance is an Australian provider of room temperature diamond quantum accelerators and also provides their own software development kit called the Qristal SDK and a high performance emulator called Qristal Emulator. They have reached agreement with PTC System (S) Pte Ltd is an organization that specializes in providing enterprise data management solutions and services to enterprise customers for resale of their software products to customers in Asia. PTC is also a distributor of NVIDIA's DGX platform and customers will be able to purchase both the Qristal Emulator together with the NVIDIA DGX in order to locally achieve high performance quantum simulation without requiring a [...]

Australia's Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre (Pawsey) and Canada's Xanadu have agreed to work together to test hybrid classical/quantum computing. The two will work together to see how Pawsey's Setonix supercomputer can work in an integrated workflow with Xanadu's photonic quantum processor. The agreement will also leverage PennyLane, Xanadu's open-source software framework for quantum machine learning, quantum chemistry and quantum computing. A key focus will also be to facilitate the education of Pawsey researchers so they can gain expertise in leveraging quantum technology. Pawsey has other agreements with quantum hardware providers. Last year, Pawsey installed a small NV-diamond based processor from Quantum [...]

Abu Dhabi’s Quantum Research Center at the Technology Innovation Institute (QRC-TII) has a new research agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to explore quantum computing applications. As part of the agreement, QRC-TTI will have access to the quantum processors available on Amazon Braket and also AWS High Performance Computing (HPC) classical computing resources. AWS will provide a spending match for the next three years of all eligible projects using this service and provide workshops, classes, and other support to help QRC-TTI researchers get up to speed. AWS will also help connect local AWS enterprise customers with the TII team to help [...]

Topology map of the IBM Seattle (Osprey r1) Processor. The dark blue dots indicate operational qubits, the light purple dots indicate non-operational qubits. IBM announced their 433 qubit Osprey processor last November as part of their IBM Quantum Summit and indicated that it would be available to members of the IBM Quantum Network in a few months. They have now released this machine for users in what IBM calls an "Exploratory" status. The initial machine of this family is called IBM_Seattle. This particular processor has 413 of the 433 qubits working due to some physical problems in the wiring. Initial qubit [...]