News Brief

The awards were made pursuant to three funding opportunity announcements released earlier this year. These include Quantum Information Science and Research Infrastructure, Entanglement Management and Control in Transparent Optical Quantum Networks and Quantum Internet to Accelerate Scientific Discovery. Awards totaling $30 million were made to five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers (NSRC) to enable new discoveries and development of nanotechnologies and advance QIS, chemistry, materials, and clean energy. Awards of $6 million were made to create new devices which could form the building blocks of a quantum internet. And another $25 million in awards were made to support the research, design, development, and demonstration of regional-scale quantum network [...]

The funding round was led by Main Sequence Ventures and a consortium of former QxBranch founders. (QxBranch was sold to Rigetti Computing in 2019). Additional funding participation came from from CP Ventures, Investible, Jelix Ventures, MA Financial (formerly Moelis Australia) Growth Ventures Fund, R3I Ventures, and Ultratech Capital Partners. Quantum Brilliance is developing a quantum computing platform based on atomic-scale defects in diamond (nitrogen-vacancy centers) that will run at room temperature. Their goal is to provide a quantum accelerator with about 50 qubits in a device the size of a lunchbox by 2025. Quantum Brilliance is a spinout of the diamond [...]

Xanadu, a full-stack quantum startup developing photonics-based quantum hardware, will use imec to build their chips. Imec (Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre), located in Leuven, Belgium, is a non-profit research and development organization active in nanoelectronics and digital technologies with significant semiconductor processing capabilities. The processing will occur on one of imec's 200mm or 300mm fabrication lines and will use an ultra-low loss silicon nitride (SiN) waveguide technology to generate squeezed states for synthesizing qubits. Xanadu is the second photonics based quantum company announcing a partnerships with a semiconductor foundry to build its chips. Earlier this year, PsiQuantum announced it will be using [...]

UC Riverside will research combining organic molecules with silicon quantum dots to create qubits that can operate at room temperature. They will partner with researchers from the University of Utah, University of Texas Austin, and the University of Colorado Boulder. Currently quantum dot technology needs to run at low temperatures using cryogenic cooling so developing something that can run at room temperatures would be a big advantage. Additional information about this project can be seen in a news release from UC Riverside located here. August 17, 2021

Quantum Machines has named Per Nyberg as Vice President of Strategic Markets and Alliances, Avi Gabay as Vice President of Finance and Dotan Sokolov as Vice President of R&D. Q-CTRL has formed a Technical Advisory Board consisting of Pieter Abbeel, Professor at UC Berkeley, Jason Cong, Professor at UCLA, Richard Murray, Professor at Caltech, Daniela Rus, Professor at MIT, and Birgitta Whaley, Professor at UC Berkeley. Rigetti Computing has named Brian Sereda as Chief Financial Officer and Jackie Kaweck as Senior Vice President, Human Resources. You can view the announcements from Quantum Machines here, from Q-CTRL here, and from Rigetti Computing [...]

The SuperstaQ platform is what we would call a translator and optimizer. It takes as input quantum programs written in either the Cirq or Qiskit or OpenApi formats and outputs optimized code targeted for quantum backends from IBM, IonQ, Rigetti, or Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Advanced Quantum Testbed. As part of this process, SuperstaQ implements a large array of full-stack optimization techniques including dynamical decoupling, excited state promotion, zero noise extrapolation and others to be used with the targeted backend's pulse-level native gates. The goal would be to arrive at an optimized program that has a minimized gate depth and best [...]

The latest release of Cirq now supports the Rigetti Quantum Virtual Machine (QVM) and the Rigetti Quantum Computing Service. This support joins support for other supported quantum backends from AQT, Pasqal, and IonQ as well as Google's own quantum computers. Other enhancements include two-qubit unitary decomposition for (inverse) sqrt-iSWAP, Typescript development and 3D Circuits along with other minor enhancements. Additional details are available in the release notes available on the Cirq GitHub site here. August 16, 2021

The contract given to Riverlane will be for benchmarking software to compare the performance of different quantum computers. This can provide insights into the characteristics of different hardware architectures, latency, and other factors. This contract is the first quantum software award made by National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC). Riverlane is a quantum software startup located in Cambridge, UK and among other projects is leading a consortium to build Deltaflow.OS; a new operating system for quantum computers. NQCC's mission vision is to lead the development, application and commercialization of quantum computing and accelerate the growth of UK business and the quantum supply [...]

Netherlands-based Quix has made its third announcement this year of a sale of its 12 mode quantum photonic processor. This latest sale has gone to the Institute for Photonic Quantum Systems (PhoQS) at Paderborn University in Germany which specializes in researching photonic quantum technologies. Previously, Quix had announced sales of this processor to UK-based Qontrol and French company Quandela. You can read the full announcement of this sale in a news release from Quix available on their website here. August 10, 2021

HQS Quantum Simulations has created a backend for their qoqo quantum circuit representation library that connects the software to a ion trap quantum computer simulator from AQT. This is a stepping stone for a future implementation that will allow qoqo to be used with AQT's ion trap quantum computer. HQS specializes in providing quantum simulation software for use in material discovery for customers in the chemical industry and academia. HQS's qoqo platform joins several other software platforms that also support the AQT architecture including Google's Cirq, IBM's Qiskit, Xanadu's Pennylane, CQC's Pytket, ProjectQ, and Quest. Additional details are available in a [...]