Quantum News

24 Jan 2024: A January 19 announcement of the connection reveals that the machine has five qubits and is available as a test bed for the university’s project collaborators, with other researchers able to use it as a development platform for their own efforts using the machine’s ultra-low temperature CMOS and parametric amplifiers. Collaborators include the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so this machine’s success may assist US quantum development efforts.

19 Jan 2024: Scientists achieve groundbreaking room-temperature quantum coherence for 100 nanoseconds, propelling molecular qubits closer to practical quantum computing.

11 Jan 2024: A Chinese company has made a 72-qubit superconducting quantum chip with foreign machines as the United States’s curbs failed to slow China’s development in this area. Origin Quantum, a Hefei-based quantum computer maker, on January 6 officially launched its third-generation quantum computer called Wukong, which uses the name of the Monkey King in Chinese mythology as the superhero can transform into 72 different forms.

31 Dec 2023: The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been working on standardizing post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms since 2012. Out of 82 submitted algorithms, NIST has shortlisted four, with a final decision expected in 2024 after a public consultation period. Albrecht anticipates nation-state adversaries having quantum computers before criminal gangs, making the practical implementation of quantum computers for encryption cracking a distant possibility.

26 Dec 2023: The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is investing €100 million in a project to establish the first European quantum computers at six sites within the EU. With equal funding from the EU and 17 participating countries, the initiative aims to address real-world challenges in materials development, drug discovery, weather forecasting, transportation, and more. Notable companies like Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) and Qilimanjaro are playing significant roles, showcasing advancements in quantum computing technology.

19 Dec 2023: Ryan Babbush and his colleagues at Google have developed an algorithm to translate a large range of classical problems so that they can be run on quantum computers. “There’s an important class of classical systems in which we can get an exponential speed-up in simulating the dynamics of those systems on a quantum computer,” says Babbush. Babbush and his team realised that the mathematics of these classical spring systems, however complex, could always be expressed as a version of the Schrödinger equation, which describes how any quantum system changes through time.

11 Dec 2023: The DARPA program ONISQ has achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing by creating the world’s first quantum circuit with logical quantum bits (qubits). Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize various fields by exploiting quantum effects and complex mathematics to significantly speed up information processing. However, the high error rate in quantum computing has been a challenge. DARPA’s approach involves using Rydberg qubits, which have the advantage of being homogeneous, allowing for rapid scaling and easy manipulation using lasers.

04 Dec 2023: IBM has announced Condor, its first quantum computer with over 1,000 qubits. However, rather than just focusing on increasing the the number of qubits, IBM intends to make them more error-resistant, shown in simultaneous release of Heron, with 133 qubits and a record-low error rate.

28 Nov 2023: Amazon Web Services has unveiled a groundbreaking quantum chip, a custom-designed device fabricated in-house by its quantum team. The chip marks a significant milestone in error-corrected quantum computing, with a passive error correction approach able to suppress errors by 100x by using a passive error correction approach.

19 Nov 2023: Quantum computing in finance will be a game-changer. However, businesses need to be aware of quantum safety as well. The IBM Quantum Network has been helping partners to develop and test quantum computing use cases. Applications include portfolio optimization, risk management, fraud detection, and encryption.