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Quantum computing

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Quantum computer

Toward a code-breaking quantum computer

Building on a landmark algorithm, researchers propose a way to make a smaller and more noise-tolerant quantum factoring circuit for cryptography.

August 23, 2024

Read full story →

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Physicists report new insights into exotic particles key to magnetism

The work on excitons, originating from ultrathin materials, could impact future electronics and establishes a new way to study these particles through a powerful instrument at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

August 1, 2024

The colorful assemblage of cables and circuits that make up a quantum computer are shown in close detail.

Testing spooky action at a distance

A quantum computing research collaboration connects MIT with the University of Copenhagen.

July 31, 2024

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Modular, scalable hardware architecture for a quantum computer

A new quantum-system-on-chip enables the efficient control of a large array of qubits, moving toward practical quantum computing.

May 29, 2024

On top is a green cloud of atoms point up, and on bottom is a blue cloud of atoms pointing down. In between the clouds are lines representing a magnetic field repelling the atoms.

Physicists arrange atoms in extremely close proximity

The technique opens possibilities for exploring exotic states of matter and building new quantum materials.

May 2, 2024

A futuristic quantum computer chip is made of a grid with qubits on the intersections. These red spherical qubits emit flame-like energy between them.

MIT scientists tune the entanglement structure in an array of qubits

The advance offers a way to characterize a fundamental resource needed for quantum computing.

April 24, 2024

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A home where world-changing innovations take flight

The Engine Accelerator offers “tough tech” startups space, support, and a network to help them scale up.

April 17, 2024

Stylized drawing of a computer monitor with a black screen, surrounded by green beams of light and a completed task list on each side. Behind these objects are two IBM quantum computers, shown as cylinders connected to wires

A blueprint for making quantum computers easier to program

A CSAIL study highlights why it is so challenging to program a quantum computer to run a quantum algorithm, and offers a conceptual model for a more user-friendly quantum computer.

April 16, 2024

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Unlocking the quantum future

At the MIT Quantum Hackathon, a community tackles quantum computing challenges.

March 18, 2024

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Electrons become fractions of themselves in graphene, study finds

An exotic electronic state observed by MIT physicists could enable more robust forms of quantum computing.

February 21, 2024

Illustration shows a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles, each with a colorful qubit represented as a circle with an arrow through it. Colorful lines connect the three. Other qubits fly around.

Technique could improve the sensitivity of quantum sensing devices

The method lets researchers identify and control larger numbers of atomic-scale defects, to build a bigger system of qubits.

February 8, 2024

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New MIT.nano equipment to accelerate innovation in “tough tech” sectors

The advanced fabrication tools will enable the next generation of microelectronics and microsystems while bridging the gap from the lab to commercialization.

January 30, 2024

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With a quantum “squeeze,” clocks could keep even more precise time, MIT researchers propose

More stable clocks could measure quantum phenomena, including the presence of dark matter.

November 30, 2023

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Celebrating five years of MIT.nano

The Nano Summit highlights nanoscale research across multiple disciplines at MIT.

November 27, 2023

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Physicists trap electrons in a 3D crystal for the first time

The results open the door to exploring superconductivity and other exotic electronic states in three-dimensional materials.

November 8, 2023

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A model of the interior of a quantum computer in the form of a tower with several stories of metallic and gold-colored wires.

Quantum Computing Advance Begins New Era, IBM Says

A quantum computer came up with better answers to a physics problem than a conventional supercomputer.

A model of the interior of a quantum computer at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Credit... James Estrin/The New York Times

Supported by

Kenneth Chang

By Kenneth Chang

  • Published June 14, 2023 Updated June 19, 2023

Quantum computers today are small in computational scope — the chip inside your smartphone contains billions of transistors while the most powerful quantum computer contains a few hundred of the quantum equivalent of a transistor. They are also unreliable. If you run the same calculation over and over, they will most likely churn out different answers each time.

But with their intrinsic ability to consider many possibilities at once, quantum computers do not have to be very large to tackle certain prickly problems of computation, and on Wednesday, IBM researchers announced that they had devised a method to manage the unreliability in a way that would lead to reliable, useful answers.

“What IBM showed here is really an amazingly important step in that direction of making progress towards serious quantum algorithmic design,” said Dorit Aharonov, a professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who was not involved with the research.

While researchers at Google in 2019 claimed that they had achieved “quantum supremacy” — a task performed much more quickly on a quantum computer than a conventional one — IBM’s researchers say they have achieved something new and more useful, albeit more modestly named.

“We’re entering this phase of quantum computing that I call utility,” said Jay Gambetta, a vice president of IBM Quantum. “The era of utility.”

A team of IBM scientists who work for Dr. Gambetta described their results in a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature .

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What’s next for quantum computing

Companies are moving away from setting qubit records in favor of practical hardware and long-term goals.

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This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s  What’s Next series , where we look across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future

In 2023, progress in quantum computing will be defined less by big hardware announcements than by researchers consolidating years of hard work, getting chips to talk to one another, and shifting away from trying to make do with noise as the field gets ever more international in scope.

For years, quantum computing’s news cycle was dominated by headlines about record-setting systems. Researchers at Google and IBM have had spats over who achieved what—and whether it was worth the effort. But the time for arguing over who’s got the biggest processor seems to have passed: firms are heads-down and preparing for life in the real world. Suddenly, everyone is behaving like grown-ups.

As if to emphasize how much researchers want to get off the hype train, IBM is expected to announce a processor in 2023 that bucks the trend of putting ever more quantum bits, or “qubits,” into play. Qubits, the processing units of quantum computers, can be built from a variety of technologies, including superconducting circuitry, trapped ions, and photons, the quantum particles of light. 

IBM has long pursued superconducting qubits, and over the years the company has been making steady progress in increasing the number it can pack on a chip. In 2021, for example, IBM unveiled one with a record-breaking 127 of them. In November, it debuted  its 433-qubit Osprey processor , and the company aims to release a 1,121-qubit processor called Condor in 2023. 

But this year IBM is also expected to debut its Heron processor, which will have just 133 qubits. It might look like a backwards step, but as the company is keen to point out, Heron’s qubits will be of the highest quality. And, crucially, each chip will be able to connect directly to other Heron processors, heralding a shift from single quantum computing chips toward “modular” quantum computers built from multiple processors connected together—a move that is expected to help quantum computers scale up significantly. 

Heron is a signal of larger shifts in the quantum computing industry. Thanks to some recent breakthroughs, aggressive roadmapping, and high levels of funding, we may see general-purpose quantum computers earlier than many would have anticipated just a few years ago, some experts suggest. “Overall, things are certainly progressing at a rapid pace,” says Michele Mosca, deputy director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo. 

Here are a few areas where experts expect to see progress.

Stringing quantum computers together

IBM’s Heron project is just a first step into the world of modular quantum computing. The chips will be connected with conventional electronics, so they will not be able to maintain the “quantumness” of information as it moves from processor to processor. But the hope is that such chips, ultimately linked together with quantum-friendly fiber-optic or microwave connections, will open the path toward distributed, large-scale quantum computers with as many as a million connected qubits. That may be how many are needed to run useful, error-corrected quantum algorithms. “We need technologies that scale both in size and in cost, so modularity is key,” says Jerry Chow, director at IBM Quantum Hardware System Development.

Other companies are beginning similar experiments. “Connecting stuff together is suddenly a big theme,” says Peter Shadbolt, chief scientific officer of PsiQuantum , which uses photons as its qubits. PsiQuantum is putting the finishing touches on a silicon-based modular chip. Shadbolt says the last piece it requires—an extremely fast, low-loss optical switch—will be fully demonstrated by the end of 2023. “That gives us a feature-complete chip,” he says. Then warehouse-scale construction can begin: “We’ll take all of the silicon chips that we’re making and assemble them together in what is going to be a building-scale, high-performance computer-like system.” 

The desire to shuttle qubits among processors means that a somewhat neglected quantum technology will come to the fore now, according to Jack Hidary , CEO of SandboxAQ, a quantum technology company that was spun out of Alphabet last year . Quantum communications, where coherent qubits are transferred over distances as large as hundreds of kilometers, will be an essential part of the quantum computing story in 2023, he says.

“The only pathway to scale quantum computing is to create modules of a few thousand qubits and start linking them to get coherent linkage,” Hidary told MIT Technology Review. “That could be in the same room, but it could also be across campus, or across cities. We know the power of distributed computing from the classical world, but for quantum, we have to have coherent links: either a fiber-optic network with quantum repeaters, or some fiber that goes to a ground station and a satellite network.”

Many of these communication components have been demonstrated in recent years. In 2017, for example, China’s Micius satellite showed that coherent quantum communications could be accomplished between nodes separated by 1,200 kilometers. And in March 2022, an international group of academic and industrial researchers demonstrated a quantum repeater that effectively relayed quantum information over 600 kilometers of fiber optics. 

Taking on the noise

At the same time that the industry is linking up qubits, it is also moving away from an idea that came into vogue in the last five years—that chips with just a few hundred qubits might be able to do useful computing, even though noise easily disrupts their operations. 

This notion, called “noisy intermediate-scale quantum” (NISQ), would have been a way to see some short-term benefits from quantum computing, potentially years before reaching the ideal of large-scale quantum computers with many hundreds of thousands of qubits devoted to correcting errors. But optimism about NISQ seems to be fading. “The hope was that these computers could be used well before you did any error correction, but the emphasis is shifting away from that,” says Joe Fitzsimons, CEO of Singapore-based Horizon Quantum Computing.

Some companies are taking aim at the classic form of error correction, using some qubits to correct errors in others. Last year, both Google Quantum AI and Quantinuum , a new company formed by Honeywell and Cambridge Quantum Computing, issued papers demonstrating that qubits can be assembled into error-correcting ensembles that outperform the underlying physical qubits.

Other teams are trying to see if they can find a way to make quantum computers “fault tolerant” without as much overhead. IBM, for example, has been exploring characterizing the error-inducing noise in its machines and then programming in a way to subtract it (similar to what noise-canceling headphones do). It’s far from a perfect system—the algorithm works from a prediction of the noise that is likely to occur, not what actually shows up. But it does a decent job, Chow says: “We can build an error-correcting code, with a much lower resource cost, that makes error correction approachable in the near term.”

Maryland-based IonQ , which is building trapped-ion quantum computers, is doing something similar. “The majority of our errors are imposed by us as we poke at the ions and run programs,” says Chris Monroe, chief scientist at IonQ. “That noise is knowable, and different types of mitigation have allowed us to really push our numbers."

Getting serious about software

For all the hardware progress, many researchers feel that more attention needs to be given to programming. “Our toolbox is definitely limited, compared to what we need to have 10 years down the road,” says Michal Stechly of Zapata Computing , a quantum software company based in Boston. 

The way code runs on a cloud-accessible quantum computer is generally “circuit-based,” which means the data is put through a specific, predefined series of quantum operations before a final quantum measurement is made, giving the output. That’s problematic for algorithm designers, Fitzsimons says. Conventional programming routines tend to involve looping some steps until a desired output is reached, and then moving into another subroutine. In circuit-based quantum computing, getting an output generally ends the computation: there is no option for going round again.

Horizon Quantum Computing is one of the companies that have been building programming tools to allow these flexible computation routines. “That gets you to a different regime in terms of the kinds of things you’re able to run, and we’ll start rolling out early access in the coming year,” Fitzsimons says.

Helsinki-based Algorithmiq is also innovating in the programming space. “We need nonstandard frameworks to program current quantum devices,” says CEO Sabrina Maniscalco. Algorithmiq’s newly launched drug discovery platform, Aurora, combines the results of a quantum computation with classical algorithms. Such “hybrid” quantum computing is a growing area, and it’s widely acknowledged as the way the field is likely to function in the long term. The company says it expects to achieve a useful quantum advantage—a demonstration that a quantum system can outperform a classical computer on real-world, relevant calculations—in 2023. 

Competition around the world

Change is likely coming on the policy front as well. Government representatives including Alan Estevez, US undersecretary of commerce for industry and security, have hinted that trade restrictions surrounding quantum technologies are coming. 

Tony Uttley, COO of Quantinuum, says that he is in active dialogue with the US government about making sure this doesn’t adversely affect what is still a young industry. “About 80% of our system is components or subsystems that we buy from outside the US,” he says. “Putting a control on them doesn’t help, and we don’t want to put ourselves at a disadvantage when competing with other companies in other countries around the world.”

And there are plenty of competitors. Last year, the Chinese search company Baidu opened access to a 10-superconducting-qubit processor that it hopes will help researchers make forays into applying quantum computing to fields such as materials design and pharmaceutical development. The company says it has recently completed the design of a 36-qubit superconducting quantum chip. “Baidu will continue to make breakthroughs in integrating quantum software and hardware and facilitate the industrialization of quantum computing,” a spokesman for the company told MIT Technology Review. The tech giant Alibaba also has researchers working on quantum computing with superconducting qubits.

In Japan, Fujitsu is working with the Riken research institute to offer companies access to the country’s first home-grown quantum computer in the fiscal year starting April 2023. It will have 64 superconducting qubits. “The initial focus will be on applications for materials development, drug discovery, and finance,” says Shintaro Sato, head of the quantum laboratory at Fujitsu Research.

Not everyone is following the well-trodden superconducting path, however. In 2020, the Indian government pledged to spend 80 billion rupees ($1.12 billion when the announcement was made) on quantum technologies. A good chunk will go to photonics technologies—for satellite-based quantum communications, and for innovative “qudit” photonics computing.

Qudits expand the data encoding scope of qubits—they offer three, four, or more dimensions, as opposed to just the traditional binary 0 and 1, without necessarily increasing the scope for errors to arise. “This is the kind of work that will allow us to create a niche, rather than competing with what has already been going on for several decades elsewhere,” says Urbasi Sinha, who heads the quantum information and computing laboratory at the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India.

Though things are getting serious and internationally competitive, quantum technology remains largely collaborative—for now. “The nice thing about this field is that competition is fierce, but we all recognize that it’s necessary,” Monroe says. “We don’t have a zero-sum-game mentality: there are different technologies out there, at different levels of maturity, and we all play together right now. At some point there’s going to be some kind of consolidation, but not yet.”

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Breaking Down the Quantum Research That Earned Three Physicists the Nobel Prize

What they revealed could enable ultra-secure computing and new telescope technology

Will Sullivan

Will Sullivan

Daily Correspondent

Members of the Nobel Committee for Physics seated at a table, with a screen displaying pictures of the winners of the prize behind them.

On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics to Alain Aspect , John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for experiments in quantum science. Each will receive a third of the 10 million Swedish kronor (roughly $900,000) prize that accompanies the honor.

Their research laid the groundwork for ultra-secure communications and complex computing, and it demonstrated that quantum mechanics—the field that deals with the motion and interaction of the smallest particles—is fundamentally weird.

The three researchers conducted experiments that showed a special state called “entanglement,” when multiple tiny particles are linked, in a sense, so that what happens to one determines what happens to the others, even when they are separated by large distances, the Nobel committee wrote in a press release . When a scientist determines the state of a particle, all the others that are “entangled” with it will immediately take on the same state, regardless of where they are, even if they’re in a distant galaxy, writes Lee Billings for Scientific American .

Working independently, Clauser and Aspect proved this phenomenon can’t be explained by the typical laws of physics, and Zeilinger demonstrated that entanglement can “teleport” information between linked particles, Science ’s Adrian Cho reports.

The laureates’ work “has basically opened up this whole field of quantum information science and technologies,” Ronald Hanson , a quantum physicist at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands tells Science .

John Clauser poses for a photo in a workshop at his home.

The experiments carried out by the Nobel prize winners were related to a debate between scientists in the 1930s over the nature of reality, writes Charlie Wood for Quanta . Albert Einstein believed that all objects have precisely defined properties, but the physicists Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger argued a fundamental idea of quantum theory: that objects’ properties exist in a state of uncertainty until they are measured. (Think: Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead until you open the box.)

Einstein thought there was no state of uncertainty—even if a particle’s properties, such as an electron’s position, appeared to be uncertain, he argued that “hidden variables” unseen to scientists must define them. Otherwise, whatever influenced these particles would have to move faster than the speed of light to make an instantaneous change in their far-off entangled companions, and nothing can travel faster than light-speed, Einstein argued.

In the 1960s, physicist John Stewart Bell devised a thought experiment that relied on pairs of entangled particles to theoretically test Einstein’s idea, according to Science . Essentially, he imagined that two people simultaneously observed different particles that were entangled together. If hidden variables truly existed, the properties of entangled pairs would be correlated, but only up to a certain degree, writes Science .

In 1972, Clauser and colleagues carried out the first successful real-world version of Bell’s thought experiment. Because they measured super-strong correlations, their experiment suggested that quantum mechanics was right. This surprised Clauser, who had expected the results to support Einstein’s ideas, per Quanta.

Alain Aspect at a press conference in Palaiseau, France, after winning the Nobel Prize.

A decade later, Aspect and colleagues conducted a more refined experiment that ruled out another potential explanation for entanglement, further supporting quantum theory. The last major loophole from Bell’s experiment was closed in 2015 , according to Scientific American .

If the idea of entanglement still sounds confusing—it is. Not even the laureates themselves know why it happens, report Seth Borenstein, Maddie Burakoff and Frank Jordans of the Associated Press (AP). Yet each of them, in their respective research, has proved that it exists.

“I have no understanding of how it works, but entanglement appears to be very real,” Clauser says to the AP.

Zeilinger and colleagues focused on studying the use of entangled particles, per Scientific American . In 1998, for example, his team entangled a photon from one entangled pair with a photon from a different entangled pair.

Anton Zeilinger speaks in front of microphones at a press conference.

This finding has implications for transmitting information over long distances in a quantum internet, which could enable ultra-secure, encrypted communications, according to Science . These innovations might also lead to new sensors and telescopes , writes Nature News ’ Davide Castelvecchi and Elizabeth Gibney.

Entanglement has also aided preliminary work related to quantum computers, which carry out calculations too complex for conventional computers, per Nature News .

“The burgeoning investments in quantum technologies now occurring all over the world are building on scientific foundations, which flow from the pioneering work of Bell, Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger,” John Preskill , a quantum information scientist at the California Institute of Technology, tells Scientific American .

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Will Sullivan

Will Sullivan | | READ MORE

Will Sullivan is a science writer based in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in Inside Science and NOVA Next .

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Quantum Computing

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Quantum Internet Milestone Takes Entanglement Out of the Lab and into Cities

It’s a “big deal” to demonstrate entangled quantum networks outside a lab

Davide Castelvecchi, Nature magazine

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Quantum Computers Can Now Run Powerful AI That Works like the Brain

The influential AI design that makes chatbots tick now runs on quantum computers

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Will Quantum Computers Upend Cryptography as We Know It?

Experts are starting to plan for the moment when a quantum computer large enough to crack the backbone of the math that keeps things secret will be turned on.

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The company announces its latest huge chip—but will now focus on developing smaller chips with a fresh approach to “error correction”

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Scientists are trying to master the basic computing element known as a qubit to make quantum computers more powerful than electronic machines

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Quantum algorithms can find their way out of mazes exponentially faster than classical ones, at the cost of forgetting the paths they took

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Google’s Quantum Computer Hits Key Milestone by Reducing Errors

Researchers demonstrate for the first time that using more qubits can lower the error rate of quantum calculations

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Quantum Computing

Quantum Computing merges two great scientific revolutions of the 20th century: computer science and quantum physics. Quantum physics is the theoretical basis of the transistor, the laser, and other technologies which enabled the computing revolution. But on the algorithmic level, today's computing machinery still operates on ""classical"" Boolean logic. Quantum Computing is the design of hardware and software that replaces Boolean logic by quantum law at the algorithmic level. For certain computations such as optimization, sampling, search or quantum simulation this promises dramatic speedups. We are particularly interested in applying quantum computing to artificial intelligence and machine learning. This is because many tasks in these areas rely on solving hard optimization problems or performing efficient sampling.

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Encoding a magic state with beyond break-even fidelity

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Evidence for the utility of quantum computing before fault tolerance

Kim, Y., Eddins, A., Anand, S. et al. | Nature 618, 500–505 (2023)

Quantum-enhanced Markov chain Monte Carlo

Layden, D., Mazzola, G., Mishmash, R.V. et al. | Nature 619, 282–287 (2023)

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Simulating large-size quantum spin chains on cloud-based superconducting quantum computers

Yu, H., Zhao, Y., & Wei, T. C. | Physical Review Research, 5(1), 013183 (2023)

Scalable circuits for preparing ground states on digital quantum computers: the Schwinger model vacuum on 100 qubits

Farrell, R. C., Illa, M., Ciavarella, A. N., & Savage, M. J. | arXiv:2308.04481 (2023)

Quantum algorithm for high energy physics simulations

Bauer, C. W., De Jong, W. A., Nachman, B., & Provasoli, D. | arXiv:1904.03196 (2019)

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What’s Next in Quantum is   quantum-centric supercomputing

A key factor in classical supercomputing is the intersection of communication and computation. The same holds true for quantum. Quantum-centric supercomputing utilizes a modular architecture to enable scaling. It combines quantum communication and computation to increase system capacity, and uses a hybrid cloud middleware to seamlessly integrate quantum and classical workflows. To realize this next wave in quantum we are building a new system called Quantum System Two. See our quantum development roadmap

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Energy transmission in quantum field theory requires information: Research finds surprisingly simple relationship

by Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, The University of Tokyo

Energy transmission in quantum field theory requires information

An international team of researchers has found a surprisingly simple relationship between the rates of energy and information transmission across an interface connecting two quantum field theories. Their work was published in Physical Review Letters on August 30.

The interface between different quantum field theories is an important concept that arises in a variety of problems in particle physics and condensed matter physics. However, it has been difficult to calculate the transmission rates of energy and information across interfaces.

Hirosi Ooguri, Professor at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU, WPI) at the University of Tokyo and Fred Kavli, Professor at the California Institute of Technology, together with collaborators, showed that for theories in two dimensions with scale invariance there are simple and universal inequalities between three quantities.

Energy transfer rate, information transfer rate, and the size of Hilbert space (measured by the rate of increase of the number of states at high energy ): Namely, [ energy transmittance ] ≤ [ information transmittance] ≤ [ size of the Hilbert space ].

These inequalities imply that, in order to transmit energy, information must also be transmitted, and both require a sufficient number of states. They also showed that no stronger inequality is possible.

Both energy and information transmissions are important quantities, but they are difficult to calculate, and no relationship between them was known. By showing the inequality between these quantities, this paper sheds new light on this important but difficult problem .

Journal information: Physical Review Letters

Provided by Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, The University of Tokyo

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Energy.gov Home

Projects span software, control systems, and algorithms for quantum computing

WASHINGTON, D.C . - The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $65 million in funding in quantum computing for 10 projects, comprising a total of 38 separate awards.

Quantum computing may revolutionize our ability to solve problems that are hard to address with even today's largest supercomputers. The promise of quantum is deploying new ways to process information that can overcome fundamental limits faced by classic computing technologies. The goal is to more quickly and efficiently solve large, complex problems in modern science.

“With these awards we are equipping scientists with computational tools that will open new frontiers of scientific discovery,” said Ceren Susut, DOE Associate Director of Science for Advanced Scientific Computing Research. “Quantum computers may ultimately revolutionize many fields by solving problems that are currently out of reach.”

This particular investment targets software, control systems, and algorithmic advancements that will demonstrate quantum computing’s utility for scientific research problems in DOE’s mission space by improving all levels of the software stack.

Recognizing the great potential of Quantum Information Science (QIS), and also aware of the growing international competition in this promising new area of science and technology, Congress passed the National Quantum Initiative Act, which became law in December 2018.

The DOE Office of Science (SC) is an integral partner in the National Quantum Initiative and has launched a range of research programs in QIS. Research projects range from single investigators within specific disciplines to large integrated centers that span SC. To learn more about these endeavors, visit the  National QIS Research Centers .

This investment targets end-to-end software toolchains to program and control quantum systems at scale, quantum algorithms delivering quantum advantage and resilience through error detection, prevention, protection, mitigation, and correction. These are key components for the development of a software ecosystem that must be ready to account for modularity and interoperability on one side, and for specialization and performance on the other. 

Total funding is $65 million for 38 projects lasting up to five years, with $14 million in Fiscal Year 2024 dollars and outyear funding contingent on congressional appropriations. The list of projects and more information can be found on the DOE SC Advanced Scientific Computing Research program  homepage .

Selection for award negotiations is not a commitment by DOE to issue an award or provide funding. Before funding is issued, DOE and the applicants will undergo a negotiation process, and DOE may cancel negotiations and rescind the selection for any reason during that time. 

Physical Review Research

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Entanglement signature in quantum work statistics in the slow-driving regime

Jian li, mark t. mitchison, and saulo v. moreira, phys. rev. research 6 , 033297 – published 13 september 2024.

  • No Citing Articles
  • INTRODUCTION
  • THE WORK FDR PROTOCOL
  • MULTIPARTITE WORK FDR PROTOCOL
  • TWO-QUBIT EXAMPLE
  • WORK FDR WITH GENERALIZED TWO-QUBIT…
  • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In slowly driven classical systems, work is a stochastic quantity and its probability distribution is known to satisfy the work fluctuation-dissipation relation, which states that the mean and variance of the dissipated work are linearly related. Recently, it was shown that generation of quantum coherence in the instantaneous energy eigenbasis leads to a correction to this linear relation in the slow-driving regime. Here, we go even further by investigating nonclassical features of work fluctuations in setups with more than one system. To do this, we first generalize slow control protocols to encompass multipartite systems, allowing for the generation of quantum correlations during the driving process. Then, focusing on two-qubit systems, we show that entanglement generation leads to a positive contribution to the dissipated work, which is distinct from the quantum correction due to local coherence generation known from previous work. Our results show that entanglement generated during slow control protocols, e.g., as an unavoidable consequence of qubit crosstalk, comes at the cost of increased dissipation.

Figure

  • Received 31 May 2024
  • Accepted 15 August 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.033297

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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by Bibsam .

Published by the American Physical Society

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Authors & Affiliations

  • 1 Department of Physics, Lund University , Box 118, 22100 Lund, Sweden
  • 2 School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin , College Green, Dublin 2, D02 K8N4, Ireland
  • 3 Trinity Quantum Alliance, Unit 16, Trinity Technology and Enterprise Centre, Pearse Street, Dublin 2, D02YN67, Ireland
  • * Contact author: [email protected]
  • † Contact author: [email protected]
  • ‡ Contact author: [email protected]

Article Text

Vol. 6, Iss. 3 — September - November 2024

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Sketch of the TPM scheme in one step of the work FDR protocol for a two-qubit system. The system state π A ⊗ π B is projectively measured on the basis of H A B = H A ⊗ H B . The quench is then applied to the Hamiltonian, which becomes H A B ′ = H A ′ ⊗ H B ′ , while a unitary transformation described by R ̂ = R ̂ x x acts on the system state. Finally, the second measurement in the TPM scheme is performed on the basis of H A B ′ .

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Quantum Research Sciences receives U.S. Air Force’s first Quantum Computing Phase III contract

Quantum computing delivers more accurate inventory forecasting

AJ Wildridge, Ethan Krimins; and Andreas Jung

Quantum Research Sciences has received a $2.5 million, three-year Phase III Small Business Technology Transfer contract from the U.S. Air Force to deliver the Department of Defense’s first operational, production-level quantum computing software. QRS personnel are (left to right) AJ Wildridge, CTO and Purdue University doctoral student; CEO Ethan Krimins; and Andreas Jung, COO and Purdue University associate professor of physics and astronomy. (Purdue Research Foundation photo/Jennifer Mayberry)

Purdue-connected software company  Quantum Research Sciences  (QRS) has received a $2.5 million, three-year Phase III Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) contract from the U.S. Air Force to deliver the Department of Defense’s first operational, production-level quantum computing software. 

CEO Ethan Krimins said the company has used a quantum computer to accurately identify optimal inventory levels, including for parts with sporadic or infrequent demand. The Air Force will be the first customer, but the software’s capabilities will allow it to be utilized throughout the DOD. 

Headquartered in Lafayette, QRS is a  Purdue Innovates  client company and an affiliate company of the  Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute . QRS collaborates on the quantum computer software with  Andreas Jung , associate professor of physics and astronomy in Purdue University’s  College of Science , and the Jung Research Group, where AJ Wildridge carries out his doctoral research.

Supply chain challenges

A majority of the world’s inventory, whether it be in the military or private industry, sits on the shelf because user demand is not easy to predict. The Air Force considers much of its inventory unforecastable, and the consequence is that too many or too few parts are in the supply chain.

“Not having adequate inventory puts stress on industrial and supplier sourcing processes, while excess inventory has costs associated with storage, security, maintenance, theft and design obsolescence,” said Curtis Mears, director of the USAF 418th Supply Chain Management Squadron.

Most government agencies, military organizations and commercial corporations employ forecasting technology that predicts future inventory levels based on historical demand. The chances are slim that the prediction will be accurate.

“At best, a supply chain forecast is an educated guess; at worst, it is a wild guess,” Krimins said. “For organizations, the consequence is tens of millions of dollars tied up in inventory that can’t be sold, utilized or liquidated.”

A quantum software solution 

QRS has turned the problem of supply chain inventory management into an optimization scenario, something that quantum computers are uniquely capable of solving. 

“Quantum computers are excellent at optimization: quickly identifying the most efficient solution in a complex situation,” said Chris McCorkle, USAF 418th Data Science and Analysis Flight Chief. “Looking at the supply chain management problem as an optimization scenario allows us to harness quantum computers to determine how many items should be on a shelf more accurately than a classical computer can.” 

The results? “QRS quantum computer software is achieving a 28% improved accuracy over classical computers,” Krimins said.

Value isn’t just in determining how many items should be in inventory. 

“An optimal solution includes three answers: how many parts are needed, when they are needed and how they get there,” Krimins said. “The cost of our quantum software quickly pays for itself by providing organizations with the data to answer these questions without guessing or estimating.”

Contracting with the U.S. Air Force

Mears said, “The Phase III contract with the U.S. Air Force builds upon three years of effort with this technology.”

“We designed the software under a USAF Phase I STTR. It was developed into a prototype during Phase II,” Krimins said. “The culmination of our work, moving from prototype to real-world production, occurs in Phase III. The process has been a collaborative one from the start, and it would not have been possible without support from the Air Force and Purdue.”

About Quantum Research Sciences 

Quantum Research Sciences  (QRS) is an American technology company focused on the discovery, development and delivery of practical quantum software. QRS created the DOD’s first operational quantum software and is working toward new quantum software applications every day. For more information on QRS, visit  https://quantumresearchsciences.com/ .

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research institution with excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities and with two colleges in the top four in the United States, Purdue discovers and disseminates knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 105,000 students study at Purdue across modalities and locations, with 50,000 in person on the West Lafayette campus. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 13 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap, including its first comprehensive urban campus in Indianapolis, the new Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business, and Purdue Computes, at  https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives .

About Purdue Innovates

Purdue Innovates  is a unified network at Purdue Research Foundation to assist Purdue faculty, staff, students and alumni in either IP commercialization or startup creation. As a conduit to technology commercialization, intellectual property protection and licensing, startup creation and venture capital, Purdue Innovates serves as the front door to translate new ideas into world-changing impact.

For more information on licensing a Purdue innovation, contact the Office of Technology Commercialization at  [email protected] . For more information about involvement and investment opportunities in startups based on a Purdue innovation, contact Purdue Innovates at  [email protected]

Writer/Media contact: Steve Martin, [email protected] Source: Ethan Krimins, [email protected]

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Wei Zhang joins forces in uplifting quantum sciences research and education across NC Triangle and Triad (NCAT)

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Prof. Wei Zhang joins forces in uplifting quantum sciences research and education across NC Triangle and Triad (NCAT).

A recent NSF grant under the NSF QISE interdisciplinary program may help build quantum connections across the NC Triangle (UNC) and Triad (NCAT) regime. The project aims to engineer tailored modes in hybrid magnonics for quantum signal transduction and communication. The research activities will be also complemented by rich outreach activities to engage with students from local high schools and community colleges, and dissemination plans to share the research findings with the public research community. For more information regarding “magnonics”: please find “The 2024 magnonics roadmap”, J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 36 363501

Figure Caption: A microwave photon-magnon chip operating at cryogenic temperatures. (Zhang lab at UNC)

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Quantum sensors will start a revolution — if we deploy them right

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Kai Bongs is director of the Institute of Quantum Technologies at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Ulm, Germany, a professor at the University of Ulm, Germany, and at the University of Birmingham, UK.

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Simon Bennett is director of the UK Quantum Technology Hub Sensors and Timing, University of Birmingham, UK.

Anke Lohmann is founder of Anchored In, London, and chair of the quantum Business Innovation and Growth group at the Institute of Physics, London.

A quantum sensor developed by the US Army in 2020 can detect communications signals over the entire radio-frequency spectrum. Credit: United States Army

Quantum sensors exploit the fundamental properties of atoms and light to make measurements of the world. The quantum states of particles are extremely sensitive to the environment, which is a virtue for sensing, if problematic for making a quantum computer. Quantum sensors that use particles as probes can quantify acceleration, magnetic fields, rotation, gravity and the passage of time more precisely than can classical devices that are engineered or based on chemical or electrical signals. They can be used to make atomic clocks that are smaller and more accurate, cameras that can see through fog and around corners, and devices for mapping structures underground, among many other potential applications. They stand to transform a multitude of sectors, from energy, land use and transport to health care, finance and security. But their commercial promise needs to be appreciated more.

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Dyer, S. et al. Phys. Rev. Appl. 19 , 044015 (2023).

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Competing Interests

K.B. is co-inventor of US Patent 11,269,111, which relates to the gravity gradiometer mentioned in the article. He is also a shareholder in Delta-G, a spin-off company from the University of Birmingham exploiting this patent, and is on the advisory board for Quantum Exponential, an investment fund aimed at companies focused on quantum sensing.

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    A hybrid quantum-classical classification model based on branching multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz. Yan-Yan Hou. , Jian Li. & Xin-Yu Liu. Article. 09 August 2024 | Open Access.

  18. Quantum Computing

    Collaborate with us. IBM Quantum Network is a community of Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, startups and national research labs working with IBM to advance quantum computing. We're inventing what's next in quantum research. Explore our recent work, access unique toolkits, and discover the breadth of topics that matter to us.

  19. National Quantum Initiative

    The National Quantum Initiative Act provides for the continued leadership of the United States in QIS and its technology applications. It calls for a coordinated Federal program to accelerate quantum research and development for the economic and national security of the United States. The United States strategy for QIS R&D and related ...

  20. Quantum Physics (since December 1994)

    Quantum Physics (since December 1994) Quantum Physics. (since December 1994) For a specific paper, enter the identifier into the top right search box. Browse: new (most recent mailing, with abstracts) recent (last 5 mailings) current month's listings. specific year/month:

  21. Energy transmission in quantum field theory requires information

    Citation: Energy transmission in quantum field theory requires information: Research finds surprisingly simple relationship (2024, September 13) retrieved 13 September 2024 from https://phys.org ...

  22. Department of Energy Announces $65 Million for Quantum Computing Research

    The DOE Office of Science (SC) is an integral partner in the National Quantum Initiative and has launched a range of research programs in QIS. Research projects range from single investigators within specific disciplines to large integrated centers that span SC. To learn more about these endeavors, visit the National QIS Research Centers.

  23. Phys. Rev. Research 6, 033297 (2024)

    In slowly driven classical systems, work is a stochastic quantity and its probability distribution is known to satisfy the work fluctuation-dissipation relation, which states that the mean and variance of the dissipated work are linearly related. Recently, it was shown that generation of quantum coherence in the instantaneous energy eigenbasis leads to a correction to this linear relation in ...

  24. Quantum Computing

    Proceedings of the U.S.-Japan Socioeconomic Policy Research Exchange: Harnessing Quantum Technology for the Benefit of Society — How the United States and Japan Are Moving Quantum Science Research from the Lab to Everyday Life. Quantum technology is relatively new but could eventually affect many aspects of life. These conference proceedings ...

  25. Progress in quantum teleportation

    Theoretical progress. In quantum teleportation, an unknown quantum state is transmitted from one location, usually referred to as the sender, Alice to another, the receiver, Bob. It is necessary ...

  26. NQIAC Report on Quantum Networking

    (September 6, 2024) Today, the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee published its second independent assessment on the National Quantum Initiative (NQI) program, focusing on quantum networking and the role that testbeds play in research and development of quantum networking technologies. The report, titled Quantum Networking: Findings and Recommendations for Growing American ...

  27. Microsoft and Quantinuum create 12 logical qubits and demonstrate a

    The proof-of-concept case study described here is notable for several reasons. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an end-to-end workflow that employs quantum computing, HPC, and AI to simulate and solve a chemistry problem. Furthermore, the quantum-mechanical problem was solved with a high degree of accuracy.

  28. Quantum Research Sciences receives U.S. Air Force's first Quantum

    Purdue-connected software company Quantum Research Sciences (QRS) has received a $2.5 million, three-year Phase III Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) contract from the U.S. Air Force to deliver the Department of Defense's first operational, production-level quantum computing software.. CEO Ethan Krimins said the company has used a quantum computer to accurately identify optimal ...

  29. Wei Zhang joins forces in uplifting quantum sciences research and

    Prof. Wei Zhang joins forces in uplifting quantum sciences research and education across NC Triangle and Triad (NCAT). A recent NSF grant under the NSF QISE interdisciplinary program may help build quantum connections across the NC Triangle (UNC) and Triad (NCAT) regime. The project aims to engineer tailored modes in hybrid magnonics for quantum signal transduction and communication.

  30. Quantum sensors will start a revolution

    To speed things up, a strategy for coordinating research projects on quantum sensors is needed. At the research end of the pipeline, some nations, including Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, the ...