Quantum News

13 Nov 2023: The University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia has recently introduced a novel academic programme: a quantum engineering undergraduate degree. Students are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to enter the burgeoning quantum-technology sector, which has initiated the development of devices employing quantum-property-exhibiting components such as individual atoms, electrons, photons, and others. Numerous industries are placing bets on the potential advantages that the forthcoming quantum computing revolution will bring.

02 Nov 2023: Researchers in Japan have developed an ytterbium-doped optical fibre that works at room temperature for cost-effective photonic quantum applications. The developed optical fibre with ytterbium atoms can be manufactured without the need for expensive cooling systems. This overcomes a significant hurdle and opens doors to various next-generation quantum information technologies.

30 Oct 2023: In so-called “harvest now, decrypt later” (HNDL) attacks, experts have theorised that rogue nation-states and cybercriminals could hoover up masses of encrypted data with the express intention of waiting until the moment when it can be decoded with great ceremony by a quantum computer. But is this a reality? Andersen Cheng, the person who coined the term ‘harvest now, decrypt later’, says the hedas of multiple Western intelligence agencies have warned that HNDL attacks are happening “right in front of our eyes”, so much that it’s evolved into an initialism.

24 Oct 2023: Atom Computing announced that it has been doing internal testing of a 1,180 qubit quantum computer to be available to customers next year. This system represents a major step forward, from a system that operated only 100 qubits. While it won’t be possible to run an algorithm that relies on a full qubit count without failing due to an error, it represents that the technology can scale rapidly and provides a testbed for work on quantum error correction.

11 Oct 2023: Harvard team’s method of reducing errors tackles major barrier to scaling up technology A new paper in Nature illustrates a Harvard quantum computing platform’s potential to solve the longstanding problem known as quantum error correction. In the new paper, the team reports near-flawless performance of its two-qubit entangling gates with extremely low error rates. For the first time, they demonstrated the ability to entangle atoms with error rates below 0.5 percent.

10 Oct 2023: Scientists in China say their latest quantum computer has solved an ultra-complicated mathematical problem within a millionth of a second - more than 20 billion years quicker than the world’s fastest supercomputer could achieve the same task.

07 Oct 2023: Fujitsu and RIKEN in Japan launched a 64-qubit superconducting quantum computer and are constructing a 1000-qubit one. Besides providing this technology on the new hybrid quantum computing platform, Fujitsu will work to create a computing workload broker, an AI-based software that automatically selects computing resources and algorithms to solve customer problems.

07 Oct 2023: Quantum computers may still be years away, but it’s prudent that end-to-end encryption providers are ramping up defences A pressing question, then, is when that moment may arrive. At present, nobody really knows. It’s a bit like nuclear fusion. Quantum evangelists claim that it’s only a few years away. At the high end, some observers think it’s 30-plus years away and there are sceptics who find the whole idea implausible. But then it’s not that long since people thought that large language models were pie in the sky.

02 Oct 2023: One of the most well-established and disruptive uses for a future quantum computer is the ability to crack encryption. A new algorithm could significantly lower the barrier to achieving this. The saving grace has been that today’s quantum processors are a long way from the kind of scale required. But according to a report in Science, New York University computer scientist Oded Regev has discovered a new algorithm that could reduce the number of qubits required substantially.

26 Sep 2023: The data we’re encrypting online today—from financial and personal identification information to military operations and intelligence data—could be quickly decrypted in the future by an adversary with access to a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. To drive progress toward broader understanding and public adoption of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) PQC algorithms, a community of technologists, researchers, and expert practitioners launched the PQC Coalition. Founding coalition members include IBM Quantum, Microsoft, MITRE, PQShield, SandboxAQ, and University of Waterloo.