News Brief

The grant provided to the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) is for research into building stable controllable spin systems for quantum information sciences and quantum computing. It was provided by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) under the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program which is intended to improve the geographic distribution of federal R&D funding. A short announcement about this grant is available on the website of U.S. Senator Jacky Rosen here. June 29, 2021

Rigetti Multi-chip Quantum Processor Rigetti has announced that it has developed multi-chip architecture for scaling its quantum processors and will be making available an 80 qubit quantum processor on its Quantum Cloud Services platform later this year. In a paper posted on arXiv earlier this year, Rigetti described their approach to create a multi-chip quantum processor. The device is constructed with four nominally identical dice which contain that qubits which are then flip-chip bonded to a larger carrier chip which provides microwave shielding, signal routing and interfaces to the individual qubit die. The benefits of this approach is that it can [...]

Beijing based Bose Quantum (「玻色量子」) has received the investment to develop a Coherent Ising Machine (CIM) based quantum computer using optical fiber loops. NTT Research is also collaborating with CalTech on a CIM project as we reported earlier this year. The investment was led by Light by Bourne Capital. Although the amount of the investment was only specified as 10's of millions of Yuan, this would imply it was at least as large as $3 million USD. Bose Quantum has a first goal of developing a 1000 qubit machine with an eventual expansion to over 1 million qubits. The founding team [...]

ProjectQ is an open-source, hardware-agnostic software framework for quantum computing started at ETH Zurich based upon Python. It was initially created in 2016 and previously supported creating and simulating quantum programs on its own simulation platform as well as IBM's Qiskit. Most recently with version 0.6 they have added support for IonQ's and AQT's ion trap based hardware as well as Amazon Braket for the Rigetti and IonQ gate-based quantum computers as well as Amazon's SV1 simulator. For more information about ProjectQ and its expanded support for the additional quantum platforms, you can visit main GitHub page here, a post on [...]

Amazon AWS is providing access to Amazon Braket quantum computing capabilities for the INFN’s community, which includes associate researchers from up to 26 universities throughout Italy. The National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) is the Italian research institute dedicated to the study of fundamental particles and interactions; with a long history of science breakthroughs. They are also a partner of the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center (SQMS) based at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Laboratory. The collaboration will including providing the INFN community with access to Amazon's quantum computing capabilities to help identify potential quantum computing applications in high-energy [...]

Comstock Mining is an emerging leader in the sustainable extraction, valorization, and production of innovation-based, clean, renewable natural resources. They have invested $15 million in cash and stock in a newly formed quantum company called Quantum Generative Materials LLC (“GenMat”) with an additional $35 million upon GenMat’s realization of key development milestones. Upon completion of the additional funding, Comstock will own about half of Genmat. Not much is known about Genmat except that they were incorporated in May 2021 in Cheyenne, Wyoming and they are working to commercialize new quantum computing technologies to accelerate material science discovery and development. They are [...]

The program, called Quantum Austria, will be funded by Austria's Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research and will be administered by the Research Promotion Agency FFG (in German: Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft) and the Science Fund FWF (in German: Fonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung). The program will run until 2026 and proposals will be accepted in three tendering intervals starting this year. Austria is currently the home of two quantum startup companies, Alpine Quantum Technologies (AQT) and ParityQC, both based in Innsbruck. Three Austrian academic institutions have quantum activity including the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Unniversity of Innsbruck, and the Vienna Center for Quantum [...]

IonQ's 11 qubit ion trap quantum computer is now available to the public on the Google Cloud beating out Google's own superconducting quantum computer which is still in a private beta mode. Current Google Cloud customers will be able to access the IonQ machine through the Google Cloud Marketplace using their existing accounts. We had described a week ago how IonQ's ion trap architecture was being supported by Google's Cirq and now we have a better idea of why. It also may be interesting to note that one of IonQ's early investors was GV, Google's venture capital arm. IonQ's machine can [...]

The award for $998,448 has been awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to principal investigators Karen Jo Matsler and Ramon Lopez of the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) for development of a training program that trains high school teachers how to incorporate quantum physics into their math, science and engineering curricula. The project will include partners from the University of Pittsburgh and Brigham Young University. The building up of a quantum workforce is a universal concern within the quantum industry because if they cannot hire enough qualified people, it could hinder the industry's growth. In recent years many programs [...]

The Federated Quantum Systems (FQS) will be a private instance of Arqit's QuantumCloud technology oriented for use by government customers who have more stringent requirements for control and require a separate system from those used by commercial customers. Countries that will participate in this system will include the UK, USA, Japan, Canada, Italy, Belgium, and Austria with other Western Allied countries to join later in 2021. Arqit will also have industrial partners for this endeavor including BT, Sumitomo Corporation, Northrop Grumman, Leonardo, QinetiQ, Space N.V., qtlabs and Honeywell. The first satellite for this network will be launched by Virgin Orbit in [...]