Quantum Computing News and Discussions

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Europe’s First Quantum Computer with More Than 5K Qubits Launched at Jülich

January 18, 2022

JÜLICH, Germany, Jan. 18, 2022 — A quantum annealer with more than 5,000 qubits has been put into operation at Forschungszentrum Jülich. The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and D-Wave Systems, a leading provider of quantum computing systems, has launched the company’s first cloud-based quantum service outside North America. The new system is located at Jülich and will work closely with the supercomputers at JSC in future. The annealing quantum computer is part of the Jülich UNified Infrastructure for Quantum computing (JUNIQ), which was established in autumn 2019 to provide researchers in Germany and Europe with access to various quantum systems. Federal Minister of Education and Research Bettina Stark-Watzinger, Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) Hendrik Wüst, and European Commissioner Mariya Gabriel officially put the system into operation during a ceremony held today, at which they highlighted the importance of collaboration in the development of practical quantum applications across industry sectors and research fields.

https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/eu ... at-julich/


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Credit: Forschungszentrum Jülich / Sascha Kreklau
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Research team chase down advantage in quantum race
https://phys.org/news/2022-01-team-adva ... antum.html
by University of Bristol
Quantum researchers at the University of Bristol have dramatically reduced the time to simulate an optical quantum computer, with a speedup of around one billion over previous approaches.

Quantum computers promise exponential speedups for certain problems, with potential applications in areas from drug discovery to new materials for batteries. But quantum computing is still in its early stages, so these are long-term goals. Nevertheless, there are exciting intermediate milestones on the journey to building a useful device. One currently receiving a lot of attention is "quantum advantage", where a quantum computer performs a task beyond the capabilities of even the world's most powerful supercomputers.

Experimental work from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) was the first to claim quantum advantage using photons—particles of light, in a protocol called "Gaussian Boson Sampling" (GBS). Their paper claimed that the experiment, performed in 200 seconds, would take 600 million years to simulate on the world's largest supercomputer.

Taking up the challenge, a team at the University of Bristol's Quantum Engineering Technology Labs (QET Labs), in collaboration with researchers at Imperial College London and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, have reduced this simulation time down to just a few months, a speedup factor of around one billion.
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Researchers set record by preserving quantum states for more than 5 seconds
https://phys.org/news/2022-02-quantum-s ... conds.html
by Argonne National Laboratory
Quantum science holds promise for many technological applications, such as building hackerproof communication networks or quantum computers that could accelerate new drug discovery. These applications require a quantum version of a computer bit, known as a qubit, that stores quantum information.

But researchers are still grappling with how to easily read the information held in these qubits and struggle with the short memory time, or coherence, of qubits, which is usually limited to microseconds or milliseconds.

A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago has achieved two major breakthroughs to overcome these common challenges for quantum systems. They were able to read out their qubit on demand and then keep the quantum state intact for over five seconds—a new record for this class of devices. Additionally, the researchers' qubits are made from an easy-to-use material called silicon carbide, which is widely found in lightbulbs, electric vehicles and high-voltage electronics.
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Giant leap toward quantum internet realized with Bell state analyzer
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-giant-qua ... state.html
by Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Scientists' increasing mastery of quantum mechanics is heralding a new age of innovation. Technologies that harness the power of nature's most minute scale show enormous potential across the scientific spectrum, from computers exponentially more powerful than today's leading systems, sensors capable of detecting elusive dark matter, and a virtually unhackable quantum internet.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Freedom Photonics and Purdue University have made strides toward a fully quantum internet by designing and demonstrating the first ever Bell state analyzer for frequency bin coding.

Their findings were published in Optica.

Before information can be sent over a quantum network, it must first be encoded into a quantum state. This information is contained in qubits, or the quantum version of classical computing "bits" used to store information, that become entangled, meaning they reside in a state in which they cannot be described independently of one another.

Entanglement between two qubits is considered maximized when the qubits are said to be in "Bell states."
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Researchers develop quantum gate enabling investigation of optimization problems
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-quantum-g ... blems.html
by Christian Flatz, University of Innsbruck

The development of quantum computers is being pursued worldwide, and there are various concepts of how computing using the properties of the quantum world can be implemented. Many of these have already advanced experimentally into areas that can no longer be emulated on classical computers. But the technologies have not yet reached the point where they can be used to solve larger computational problems. Therefore, researchers are currently looking for applications that can be implemented on existing platforms. "We are looking for tasks that we can compute on existing hardware," says Rick van Bijnen of the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Innsbruck. A team around Van Bijnen and the Lechner research group is now proposing a method to solve optimization problems using neutral atoms.

Software solution

To develop scientifically and industrially relevant applications for existing quantum hardware in the near future, researchers are looking for special algorithms that structurally match the strengths of a quantum platform. "This co-design of algorithms and experimental platforms allows these systems to work without error correction, which is still difficult to achieve today," explains Wolfgang Lechner from the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck. The physicists envision their optimization algorithm to be implemented on neutral atoms trapped and arranged in optical tweezers. They can be programmed via the interaction of highly excited Rydberg states. To avoid the limitations of previous approaches, the physicists do not implement the algorithm directly, but use the so-called parity architecture, a scalable and problem-independent hardware design for combinatorial optimization problems, which Wolfgang Lechner developed together with Philipp Hauke and Peter Zoller in Innsbruck.
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Silicon FinFETs hosting hole spin qubits at temperatures over 4 Kelvin
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-03-sil ... ubits.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

The idea of creating a spin-based quantum computer using quantum dots was first introduced by Daniel Loss and David Di Vincenzo in 1998. Since then, countless engineers and physicists worldwide have been trying to realize their vision using existing and newly developed hardware components.

So far, silicon has proved to be among the most promising materials for creating spin-based quantum computers, as most complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOSs) in use today are made of silicon. Moreover, silicon can be designed to be free of nuclear spins, which are known to degrade the coherence of spin qubits in quantum computers.

Researchers at University of Basel and IBM Research-Zurich have recently explored the possibility of hosting spin qubits in silicon-based FinFETs, a class of transistors first introduced by researchers at University of California- Berkeley. Their results, published in Nature Electronics, were very promising, as they suggest that FinFETs could help to improve the scalability of quantum technologies.

"Billions of FinFETs are used in today's computer chips," Andreas Kuhlmann and Dominik Zumbühl, two of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "Achieving scalability (i.e., going from a few tens of qubits to many millions) remains the greatest challenge for quantum computing. So, we thought: why not build a quantum computer with a platform that has successfully mastered this challenge? Furthermore, FinFETs are also excellent hosts for (hole) spin qubits and a very handy property of hole spin qubits is their spin-orbit interaction."

The spin-orbit interaction is an important property of hole spin qubits that can be very advantageous, as it allows researchers to manipulate spin states by applying an oscillating electrical signal to them. Physics theory predicts that holes in silicon FinFETs will have an unusually large spin-orbit interaction that can be electrically modulated.
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Study highlights the possibility of building wave-shape-tolerant qubit gates
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-highlight ... gates.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Phys.org
Quantum computers, machines that leverage quantum states to perform computations and store data, could soon revolutionize the computing industry, achieving significantly greater speeds and performance than existing computers. While countless companies worldwide, including Google and IBM as well as smaller start-ups, have started working on quantum technologies, the exact architecture that will lead to their mass production remains unclear.

Researchers at Leibniz University Hannover have recently conducted a theoretical study investigating the possibility of realizing flying-qubit gates for quantum computers that are insensitive to the wave shapes of photons, and also fully preserve these shapes during processing. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, could serve as the basis for the development of new gates that can process entangled photonic wave packets more effectively than unentangled ones.
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Researchers generate high-quality quantum light with modular waveguide device
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-high-qual ... evice.html
by Optica

For the first time, researchers have successfully generated strongly nonclassical light using a modular waveguide-based light source. The achievement represents a crucial step toward creating faster and more practical optical quantum computers.

"Our goal is to dramatically improve information processing by developing faster quantum computers that can perform any type of computation without errors," said research team member Kan Takase from the University of Tokyo. "Although there are several ways to create a quantum computer, light-based approaches are promising because the information processor can operate at room temperature and the computing scale can be easily expanded."

In the Optica Publishing Group journal Optics Express, a multi-institutional team of researchers from Japan describe the waveguide optical parametric amplifier (OPA) module they created for quantum experiments. Combining this device with a specially designed photon detector allowed them to generate a state of light known as Schrödinger cat, which is a superposition of coherent states.

"Our method for generating quantum light can be used to increase the computing power of quantum computers and to make the information processer more compact," said Takase. "Our approach outperforms conventional methods, and the modular waveguide OPA is easy to operate and integrate into quantum computers."[/quote]
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First hybrid quantum bit based on topological insulators
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-hybrid-qu ... gical.html
by Forschungszentrum Juelich
With their superior properties, topological qubits could help achieve a breakthrough in the development of a quantum computer designed for universal applications. So far, no one has yet succeeded in unambiguously demonstrating a quantum bit, or qubit for short, of this kind in a lab. However, scientists from Forschungszentrum Jülich have now gone some way to making this a reality. For the first time, they succeeded in integrating a topological insulator into a conventional superconducting qubit. Just in time for "World Quantum Day" on 14 April, their novel hybrid qubit made it to the cover of the latest issue of the journal Nano Letters.

Quantum computers are regarded as the computers of the future. Using quantum effects, they promise to deliver solutions for highly complex problems that cannot be processed by conventional computers in a realistic time frame. However, the widespread use of such computers is still a long way off. Current quantum computers generally contain only a small number of qubits. The main problem is that they are highly prone to error. The bigger the system, the more difficult it is to fully isolate it from its environment.
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Assessing physical realism experimentally in a quantum-regulated device
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-physical- ... evice.html
by Thamarasee Jeewandara , Phys.org
In a new report now published in Nature Communications Physics, Pedro R. Dieguez and an international team of scientists in quantum technologies, functional quantum systems and quantum physics, developed a new framework of operational criterion for physical reality. This attempt facilitated their understanding of a quantum system directly via the quantum state at each instance of time. During the work, the team established a link between the output visibility and elements of reality within an interferometer. The team provided an experimental proof-of-principle for a two-spin-½ system in an interferometric setup within a nuclear magnetic resonance platform. The outcomes validated Bohr's original formulation of the complementarity principle.

Physics according to Niels Bohr

Bohr's complementarity principle states that matter and radiation can be submitted to a unifying framework where either element can behave as a wave or a particle, based on the experimental setup. According to Bohr's natural philosophy, the nature of individuality of quantum systems is discussed relative to the definite arrangement of whole experiments. Almost a decade ago, physicists designed a quantum delayed choice experiment (QDCE), with a beam splitter in spatial quantum superposition to render the interferometer to have a "closed + open" configuration, while the system represented a hybrid "wave + particle" state. Researchers had previously coupled a target system to a quantum regulator and tested these ideas to show how photons can exhibit wave-like or particle-like behaviors depending on the experimental technique used to measure them. Based on the capability to smoothly interpolate the statistics between a wave- and particle-like pattern, physicists suggested the manifestation of morphing behaviors in the same system; claiming a radical revision of Bohr's complementarity principle.
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