News Brief

Qubits Ventures and Luminate Accelerator are sponsoring an online pitch competition for early stage quantum and photonics startups. The winner will receive an investment of at least $100,000 from a group of investors including the Luminate Accelerator and Qubits Ventures. And runners up will receive a fellowship to the Quantum & Photonics Accelerator managed by the Founder Institute. Startup companies that have raised less than $2.5 million in funding are eligible to apply for the competition before the application deadline of September 11, 2022. Seven finalists will be selected for the live online pitch competition to be held on September 20, 2022. [...]

We reported in August 2021 about a new software program from Multiverse Computing called Singularity. This program has an interesting characteristic in that it is implemented as an Excel plug-in that make it easy and quick for an inexperienced end user to try without requiring them to learn a lot about quantum computing. They have now released an update to this program that includes Singularity Portfolio Optimization v1.2 that supports a variety of modes including a Multiverse Hybrid mode, a D-Wave Leap Hybrid mode, and a pure classical solver. The program also can accept a variety of constraints while performing the [...]

The quantum processor is named Qian Shi and implements 10 qubits using superconducting technology. They also indicated they are working on their next generation 36 qubit machine which will use tunable couplers for better isolation, cross-talk resistance and higher gate fidelities. To provide access to this and other quantum processors, Baidu also announced a cloud-based quantum operating environment called Liang Xi. Liang Xi includes a large collection of software modules including Quantum Leaf for providing quantum cloud access, Quanise for quantum control, QEP which is a quantum error correction toolkit, Paddle Quantum for quantum machine learning, and QNET which is a [...]

The companies established the RIKEN RQC-FUJITSU Collaboration Center in April 2021 to research quantum computers using superconducting technologies. They have a longer term goal of developing hardware and software within the next few years that will scale up to 1,000 qubits. Their more immediate goal is to provide a 64 qubit machine in the next Japanese fiscal year that starts in April 2023. Last year, IBM installed an IBM System One processor in Kawasaki City that is managed by the University of Tokyo as part of the Quantum Innovation Initiative Consortium (QIIC) to facilitate collaboration on quantum computing between industry, academia, [...]

At first glance you might wonder why BASF, a large chemical company, would be working with Multiverse Computing to use quantum computing for a financial problem. But on closer look, you would see that BASF is a giant company with 2021 revenues of €78.6 billion ($78.2B USD) and operates in over 190 countries. So they need to convert currencies in their operations all the time and even small improvements in the exchange rates that they can achieve could be worth a lot of money. The team started a small 9 month research effort in January 2022 that focused only on the trading [...]

For its second quarter of fiscal 2022, D-Wave reported revenues of $1.371 million versus $1.137 million in the second quarter of 2021. Adjusted EBITDA showed a loss of $10.385 million versus a loss of $8.804 million in the same period a year ago and GAAP Net loss was $13.198 million versus a net loss of $4.668 million in 2021. The company reported that its customer base consists of 95 customers of which 55 are commercial organizations, representing an increase of 44% in the number of commercial organization customers in the past year. CEO Alan Baratz acknowledge during the earning calls certain [...]

Taking advantage of its expertise in quantum control Q-CTRL has now formed a new division to utilize this capability for quantum sensing applications. They will be focusing on applications such as quantum-enhanced navigation, persistent Earth observation, and magnetic anomaly detection. They are developing ultrasensitive software-defined quantum sensors that has near-term applications in many fields such as defense, navigation, minerals exploration, climate monitoring, and many others. Part of the challenge in these applications is to stabilize the signals when these devices are employed on moving platforms and Q-CTRL's software is able to help this and filter out some of the clutter. Q-CTRL's [...]

Rigetti is leading a team that also includes the University of Technology Sydney, Aalto University, and the University of Southern California which is receiving $2.9 million over a three year period subject to the achievement of certain milestones to develop benchmarks for quantum application performance on large-scale quantum computers. This is part of a larger program that DARPA announced in April 2021 which has also awarded contracts to three other teams earlier this year. The goal for this team will be to better understand how qubit errors occur, how the errors impact target applications, and what advances are needed in quantum [...]

The grant was made by the W. M. Keck Foundation to the  University of Oklahoma’s Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Center for Quantum Research and Technology and will cover a three year period. The purpose will be to see how two neighboring cold atoms can use self-organization to be synchronized and achieve entanglement. This would be analogous to how many systems in the classical world, such as two neighboring pendulums, tend to get in sync. The researchers will try to different methods to get the atoms to synchronize. The first uses focused laser beams to create what [...]

Multiverse and Bosch will be working to create a quantum computing model of the machinery and process flow in at one of Bosch's manufacturing plants in a process known as digital twin. This is a technique where a model of the activities in the facility will be created inside the computer and then enable various simulations and optimizations to be performed which can predict how the plant will perform under different scenarios. The companies will be using both customized quantum and quantum inspired algorithms developed by Multiverse in order to model an automotive electronic components plants located in Madrid, Spain. The [...]