Vaccine and drug development, artificial intelligence, transport and logistics, climate science—these are all areas that stand to be transformed by the development of a full-scale quantum computer. And there has been explosive growth in quantum computing investment over the past decade.

Yet current quantum processors are relatively small in scale, with fewer than 100 qubits— the basic building blocks of a quantum computer. Bits are the smallest unit of information in computing, and the term qubits stems from “quantum bits.”

While early quantum processors have been crucial for demonstrating the potential of quantum computing, realizing globally significant applications will likely require processors with upwards of a million qubits.

Our new research tackles a core problem at the heart of scaling up quantum computers: how do we go from controlling just a few qubits, to controlling millions? In research published today in Science Advances, we reveal a new technology that may offer a solution. Read More

Today, machine learning applications touch almost every angle of business, science, and private life, ranging from speech and image recognition to generative models to improve drug design. Machine learning’s primary goal is to train computers to make sense of an ever-expanding pool of data. However, in order to learn from these increasingly complex datasets, the underlying models, such as deep neural networks, also become more sophisticated and expensive to train.

This results in complicated models with very long training times that risk over-fitting without sufficient generalization. In other words, we must be vigilant that our models meaningfully understand our data, rather than merely memorizing what they have already seen. Therefore, a lot of effort is put into improving training algorithms of models, as well as dedicated classical hardware. Read More

#quantum

The generation of high-fidelity distributed multi-qubit entanglement is a challenging task for large-scale quantum communication and computational networks^1,2,3,4. The deterministic entanglement of two remote qubits has recently been demonstrated with both photons^5,6,7,8,9,10 and phonons¹¹. However, the deterministic generation and transmission of multi-qubit entanglement has not been demonstrated, primarily owing to limited state-transfer fidelities. Here we report a quantum network comprising two superconducting quantum nodes connected by a one-metre-long superconducting coaxial cable, where each node includes three interconnected qubits. By directly connecting the cable to one qubit in each node, we transfer quantum states between the nodes with a process fidelity of 0.911 ± 0.008. We also prepare a three-qubit Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) state^12,13,14 in one node and deterministically transfer this state to the other node, with a transferred-state fidelity of 0.656 ± 0.014. We further use this system to deterministically generate a globally distributed two-node, six-qubit GHZ state with a state fidelity of 0.722 ± 0.021. The GHZ state fidelities are clearly above the threshold of 1/2 for genuine multipartite entanglement¹⁵, showing that this architecture can be used to coherently link together multiple superconducting quantum processors, providing a modular approach for building large-scale quantum computers^16,17. Read More

#quantum

Quantum computers, according to experts, will one day be capable of performing incredible calculations and nearly unfathomable feats of logic. In the near future, we know they’ll help us discover new drugs to fight disease and new materials to build with. But the far future potential for these enigmatic machines is as vast as the universe itself.

…. Reality, one way or another, boils down to whatever our brains believe it is. And this makes the idea of altering our memories, and thus our realities, all the more appealing – or terrifying, depending on how you look at it. Read More

Quantum computing is nearing a ‘tipping point’, says CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits. The arrival of powerful new refrigerators will allow organizations to take quantum computing to new heights, by improving the “quality” of superconducting quantum bits (qubits). Read More

#quantum

The setup of lasers and mirrors effectively “solved” a problem far too complicated for even the largest traditional computer system.

For the first time, a quantum computer made from photons—particles of light—has outperformed even the fastest classical supercomputers.

Physicists led by Chao-Yang Lu and Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Shanghai performed a technique called Gaussian boson sampling with their quantum computer, named Jiŭzhāng. The result, reported in the journal Science, was 76 detected photons—far above and beyond the previous record of five detected photons and the capabilities of classical supercomputers. Read More

IBM Corp. is looking to make enterprise workloads deployed on its public cloud resistant to tomorrow’s encryption-breaking quantum computers.

As a first step to that end, the company today introduced  “quantum-safe cryptography” capabilities for three services in IBM Cloud: Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, Cloud Kubernetes Service and Key Protect. Customers using the services can now secure data with an encryption algorithm that will have a better chance of withstanding future quantum attacks, according to the company.  Read More