Quantum News

13 Feb 2024: The recent study highlights a breakthrough in quantum photonics, demonstrating significant progress in integrating single-photon sources on-chip at room temperature, which is crucial for advancing quantum computing, cryptography, and sensing. By employing a hybrid metal–dielectric bullseye antenna for exceptional photon directionality, the research showcases a method for efficient photon back-excitation and coupling, using either colloidal quantum dots or nanodiamonds as single-photon emitters. Achieving front collection efficiencies of about 70% with low numerical aperture optics, this innovation simplifies the integration of quantum light sources into practical quantum systems, promising to accelerate the development of quantum photonic devices.

13 Feb 2024: The paper presents an optimization for reducing the number of qubits required in quantum factoring, specifically targeting Shor’s algorithm. By employing a combination of techniques, including May and Schlieper’s truncation and the Ekerå-Håstad variant, the authors achieve a significant reduction in qubit requirement to factor an RSA-2048 instance, potentially using less than 1700 qubits

05 Feb 2024: QuEra Computing, a Boston-based company, aims to revolutionize computing with quantum technology. They plan to launch a 10,000 qubit quantum computer by 2026, surpassing the capabilities of today’s fastest supercomputers. QuEra’s roadmap includes launching a quantum computer with 256 physical qubits and 10 logical qubits this year, followed by a 3,000-qubit quantum computer in 2025. by 2026, QuEra wants to unleash the 10,000 physical qubits quantum computer with 100 logical qubits.

29 Jan 2024: Researchers, led by Jeff Thompson at Princeton University, have developed a novel method to detect and correct errors in quantum computers in real time, potentially making them up to ten times easier to correct. This advancement, detailed in a recent paper in Nature, focuses on identifying errors more easily than previous methods, which primarily aimed to reduce error probabilities. By utilizing a different set of energy levels within atoms to store qubits, the team can monitor qubits during computations and detect errors without destroying the qubits.

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.