All posts tagged: quantum computing

UK National Cryogenic Facility advances quantum technologies

UK National Cryogenic Facility advances quantum technologies

Published by skeptic

The UK Government has committed more than £51m to establish a National Cryogenic Facility, a move designed to strengthen the country’s position in quantum technologies and advanced materials research. The investment, delivered through the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Infrastructure Fund, will support the development of a large-scale testing environment capable of operating at temperatures colder than deep space. Located at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Daresbury Laboratory in the Liverpool City Region, the National Cryogenic Facility is expected to expand the UK’s capacity for ultra-low temperature experimentation significantly. Officials say the site will enable both academic researchers and industry to test materials and systems at temperatures ranging from 2 Kelvin to 20 Kelvin. Paul Vernon, Head of STFC Daresbury Laboratory, commented: “This new investment is a defining moment, not just for Daresbury Laboratory and the Liverpool City Region, but for the UK’s place in the global technology race. “Truly game-changing infrastructure, the National Cryogenic Facility is possibly the first user facility of this kind. It unlocks quantum computing at scale and provides …

UK’s £2bn “quantum leap” set to benefit critical industries

UK’s £2bn “quantum leap” set to benefit critical industries

Published by skeptic

The UK has unveiled a new package of measures to become the first country in the world to roll out quantum computers at scale. The UK will become the first country to benefit from revolutionary quantum computers, sensors and networks, and support the emergence of the next generation of leading British companies who will help shape the curve of progress. The delivery of full-scale quantum computers will help deliver personalised treatments, potential cures for diseases, safeguard national security and deliver high-paid jobs – delivering on the government’s Modern Industrial Strategy. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said: “I am determined that this country grasps the benefits that quantum computing will bring. “It is only by keeping pace with technological progress that we can deliver the high-paid jobs, cutting-edge public services, and innovations which change lives.” How quantum technology impacts the UK economy Estimates show that quantum could boost productivity by 7% over the next 2 decades, creating more than 100,000 jobs in the process. This would deliver £212 billion worth of economic impact – the equivalent of adding the combined annual GDP of Wales and Northern Ireland. “Today’s announcements are an investment in our future – unlocking better health, wealth, and more opportunities for communities across the …

The race to solve the biggest problem in quantum computing

The race to solve the biggest problem in quantum computing

Published by skeptic

Quantum computers won’t be truly useful until they can correct their mistakes davide bonaldo / Alamy Quantum computers are already here, but they make far too many errors. This is arguably the biggest obstacle to the technology really becoming useful, but recent breakthroughs suggest a solution may be on the horizon. Errors creep into traditional computers too, but there are well-established techniques for correcting them. They rely on redundancy, where extra bits are used to detect when 0s incorrectly swap to 1s or vice versa. In the quantum world, however, it is a lot more challenging. The laws of quantum mechanics forbid information from being duplicated inside a quantum computer, so redundancy must be achieved by spreading information across groups of qubits – the building blocks of quantum computers – and utilising phenomena that only exist in quantum settings, such as when pairs of particles become linked via quantum entanglement. These qubit groups are called logical qubits and figuring out the optimal way to build and use them is crucial for determining how best to …

Before quantum computing arrives, this startup wants enterprises already running on it

Before quantum computing arrives, this startup wants enterprises already running on it

Published by skeptic

Eighteen months after selling his startup to chipmaker AMD for $665 million, Finnish entrepreneur Peter Sarlin has left his role as CEO of the unit now known as AMD Silo AI. He is now chairman at two new ventures: physical AI lab NestAI, and QuTwo, an AI startup aimed at helping companies prepare for the era of quantum computing Currently fully funded by Sarlin’s family office, PostScriptum, QuTwo describes itself as “an AI lab for the quantum era.” Rather than waiting for quantum computing to mature, however, it is already working with enterprise customers — including European fashion retailer Zalando, with which it is developing what the two companies call “lifestyle agents,” AI tools designed to go beyond product search and proactively suggest products and experiences. QuTwo is built on the premise that AI is hitting an efficiency wall that quantum computing may eventually help solve. But the company is not betting on when that will happen, Sarlin told TechCrunch. Instead, the startup is building QuTwo OS as an orchestration layer that allows companies to …

Quantum chemistry may not be the “killer app” for quantum computers after all

Quantum chemistry may not be the “killer app” for quantum computers after all

Published by skeptic

Calculating the chemical properties of molecules could be a job for quantum computers ETH Zurich Quantum chemistry calculations that could advance drug development or agriculture have recently emerged as a promising “killer application” of quantum computers, but a new analysis suggests this is unlikely to be the case. Progress in building quantum computers has greatly accelerated in recent years, but it remains an open question what uses are most likely to justify the ongoing investment in this technology. One popular contender is solving problems in quantum chemistry, such as calculating the energy levels of molecules relevant for biomedicine or industry. This requires accounting for the behavior of many quantum particles – electrons in the molecule – simultaneously, so it seems like a good match for computers made from many quantum parts. However, Xavier Waintal at CEA Grenoble in France and his colleagues have now shown that two leading quantum computing algorithms for this task may actually have, at best, limited use. “My personal thinking is that it’s probably doomed, not proven doomed, but probably doomed,” …

MIT scientists built photonic ‘ski jumps’ that beam light off chips for faster quantum computing

MIT scientists built photonic ‘ski jumps’ that beam light off chips for faster quantum computing

Published by Jenni Sidey

Inside most photonic chips, light races through tiny optical wires. It carries information far faster than electricity can in many conventional systems. But once that light is trapped on the chip, sending it out into open space in a controlled, scalable way becomes much harder. A team led by researchers at MIT and MITRE now says it has built a way around that bottleneck. They did this using microscopic structures that curl upward from the chip surface like ski jumps. The devices, described in Nature, let researchers steer thousands of tiny laser beams off a chip and into free space with unusual precision. In demonstrations, the team used the platform to project full-color images about half the size of a grain of table salt. Moreover, they used the platform to control diamond-based quantum bits, or qubits, with resonant laser light. “On a chip, light travels in wires, but in our normal, free-space world, light travels wherever it wants. Interfacing between these two worlds has long been a challenge. But now, with this new platform, we …

Phantom codes could help quantum computers avoid errors

Phantom codes could help quantum computers avoid errors

Published by skeptic

Detail of a QuEra quantum computer based on extremely cold atoms QuEra Algorithms called phantom codes could help quantum computers run complex programs without errors, overcoming a big hurdle for making the technology more broadly useful. Early on, some physicists doubted that quantum computers would ever be useful because they expected these devices to be too prone to hard-to-correct errors. Today, several types of quantum computers exist and have already been used for scientific discovery and exploration. Yet, while progress has been made, researchers have not managed to fully curtail the error-making problem. Many popular error-correcting programs enable quantum computers to store information without errors, yet struggle when it comes to computation, says Shayan Majidy at Harvard University. In search of a remedy, he and his colleagues focused on calculations that include many computational steps, which makes them long and inefficient to run, and runs the risk of additional errors creeping in. Quantum computers are made from physical units called qubits, but these computations involve logical qubits, or groups of qubits that share information to …

Inside the company selling quantum entanglement

Inside the company selling quantum entanglement

Published by skeptic

Qunnect’s Carina rack for quantum entanglement Qunnect Mehdi Namazi wants to sell you quantum entanglement. He and his colleagues at Qunnect have spent nearly a decade building devices that make sharing quantum-entangled particles of light, or photons, practical enough to be used for unhackable communication. At Qunnect’s headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, large tables are filled with lasers, lenses, special crystals and other tiny components that researchers use to manipulate light. They are all destined to be neatly packaged into bright magenta boxes and then shipped to other builders of the communication technologies of the future. Against the backdrop of the stunning New York skyline, Namazi opens a box for me, revealing electronics that, at first glance, don’t appear particularly remarkable. But if you stack several of those boxes together, you get what the company calls a Carina rack – and Carina racks can make remarkable quantum things happen. In February, Qunnect’s team used these racks to perform “entanglement swapping” across 17.6 kilometres of fibre-optic cables connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan via a commercial data centre. …

Could a niche 80s technology be the key to better quantum computers?

Could a niche 80s technology be the key to better quantum computers?

Published by skeptic

Adam Weiss at SEEQC, a quantum chip foundry, configuring a dilution refrigerator SEEQC There’s a lot I love about the 1980s, from the new wave of British heavy metal to abundant purple blush favoured by the era’s make-up artists. But among all that hair, noise and glam, there were some ignored superstars: superconducting circuits. In 1980, the computing giant IBM was betting on this technology to build computers that would be so efficient as to be revolutionary. In May that year, the popular science magazine Scientific American even put a superconducting circuit on its cover. But the revolution never came. Superconducting computer chips seemed to have gone the way of perms and pegged pants. Yet one company kept the research alive. I recently visited the headquarters of SEEQC, and the firm’s quantum chip foundry in upstate New York, which partly rose up from IBM’s shuttered superconducting computing programme. There, I learned about the company’s hopes that superconducting chips will play a hand in a new technological revolution – this time with quantum computers. Inside SEEQC’s …

Breaking encryption with a quantum computer just got 10 times easier

Breaking encryption with a quantum computer just got 10 times easier

Published by skeptic

Quantum computers can theoretically crack common encryption methods BlackJack3D/Getty Images The amount of quantum computing power needed to crack a common data encryption technique has been reduced tenfold. This makes the encryption method even more vulnerable to quantum computers, which may be able to reach the reduced size within the decade. The RSA algorithm is one of the most widely used encryption algorithms, used for things like online banking and secure communication. It is based on the mathematical difficulty of finding which two prime numbers were multiplied together to create a very large number. Since the 1990s researchers have known that this difficulty can be side-stepped by using a quantum computer, but the possibility was considered theoretical because the size needed for such a quantum computer was much larger than could be built. This has slowly started to change as researchers built larger quantum computers and the estimated size needed has come down. In 2019, Craig Gidney at Google Quantum AI co-authored a paper that reduced these requirements from 170 million to 20 million quantum …