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Quantum computing could change the world. It could transform medicine, break encryption and revolutionise communications and artificial intelligence. Companies like IBM, Microsoft and Google are racing to build reliable quantum computers. China has invested billions.

Recently, Google claimed that it had achieved quantum supremacy the first time a quantum computer has outperformed a traditional one. But what is quantum computing? And how does it work?

Lets start with the basics.

An ordinary computer chip uses bits. These are like tiny switches, that can either be in the off position represented by a zero or in the on position represented by a one. Every app you use, website you visit and photograph you take is ultimately made up of millions of these bits in some combination of ones and zeroes.

This works great for most things, but it doesnt reflect the way the universe actually works. In nature, things arent just on or off. Theyre uncertain. And even our best supercomputers arent very good at dealing with uncertainty. Thats a problem.

That's because, over the last century, physicists have discovered when you go down to a really small scale, weird things start to happen. Theyve developed a whole new field of science to try and explain them. Its called quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics is the foundation of physics, which underlies chemistry, which is the foundation of biology. So for scientists to accurately simulate any of those things, they need a better way of making calculations that can handle uncertainty. Enter, quantum computers.

Instead of bits, quantum computers use qubits. Rather than just being on or off, qubits can also be in whats called superposition where theyre both on and off at the same time, or somewhere on a spectrum between the two.

Take a coin. If you flip it, it can either be heads or tails. But if you spin it its got a chance of landing on heads, and a chance of landing on tails. Until you measure it, by stopping the coin, it can be either. Superposition is like a spinning coin, and its one of the things that makes quantum computers so powerful. A qubit allows for uncertainty.

If you ask a normal computer to figure its way out of a maze, it will try every single branch in turn, ruling them all out individually until it finds the right one. A quantum computer can go down every path of the maze at once. It can hold uncertainty in its head.

Its a bit like keeping a finger in the pages of a choose your own adventure book. If your character dies, you can immediately choose a different path, instead of having to return to the start of the book.

The other thing that qubits can do is called entanglement. Normally, if you flip two coins, the result of one coin toss has no bearing on the result of the other one. Theyre independent. In entanglement, two particles are linked together, even if theyre physically separate. If one comes up heads, the other one will also be heads.

It sounds like magic, and physicists still dont fully understand how or why it works. But in the realm of quantum computing, it means that you can move information around, even if it contains uncertainty. You can take that spinning coin and use it to perform complex calculations. And if you can string together multiple qubits, you can tackle problems that would take our best computers millions of years to solve.

Quantum computers arent just about doing things faster or more efficiently. Theyll let us do things that we couldnt even have dreamed of without them. Things that even the best supercomputer just isnt capable of.

They have the potential to rapidly accelerate the development of artificial intelligence. Google is already using them to improve the software of self-driving cars. Theyll also be vital for modelling chemical reactions.

Right now, supercomputers can only analyse the most basic molecules. But quantum computers operate using the same quantum properties as the molecules theyre trying to simulate. They should have no problem handling even the most complicated reactions.

That could mean more efficient products from new materials for batteries in electric cars, through to better and cheaper drugs, or vastly improved solar panels. Scientists hope that quantum simulations could even help find a cure for Alzheimers.

Quantum computers will find a use anywhere where theres a large, uncertain complicated system that needs to be simulated. That could be anything from predicting the financial markets, to improving weather forecasts, to modelling the behaviour of individual electrons: using quantum computing to understand quantum physics.

Cryptography will be another key application. Right now, a lot of encryption systems rely on the difficulty of breaking down large numbers into prime numbers. This is called factoring, and for classical computers, its slow, expensive and impractical. But quantum computers can do it easily. And that could put our data at risk.

There are rumours that intelligence agencies across the world are already stockpiling vast amounts of encrypted data in the hope that theyll soon have access to a quantum computer that can crack it.

The only way to fight back is with quantum encryption. This relies on the uncertainty principle the idea that you cant measure something without influencing the result. Quantum encryption keys could not be copied or hacked. They would be completely unbreakable.

Youll probably never have a quantum chip in your laptop or smartphone. Theres not going to be an iPhone Q. Quantum computers have been theorised about for decades, but the reason its taken so long for them to arrive is that theyre incredibly sensitive to interference.

Almost anything can knock a qubit out of the delicate state of superposition. As a result, quantum computers have to be kept isolated from all forms of electrical interference, and chilled down to close to absolute zero. Thats colder than outer space.

Theyll mostly be used by academics and businesses, who will probably access them remotely. Its already possible to use IBMs quantum computer via its website you can even play a card game with it.

But we still have a while to wait before quantum computers can do all the things they promise. Right now, the best quantum computers have about 50 qubits. Thats enough to make them incredibly powerful, because every qubit you add means an exponential increase in processing capacity. But they also have really high error rates, because of those problems with interference.

Theyre powerful, but not reliable. That means that for now, claims of quantum supremacy have to be taken with a pinch of salt. In October 2019, Google published a paper suggesting it had achieved quantum supremacy the point at which a quantum computer can outperform a classical computer. But its rivals disputed the claim IBM said Google had not tapped into the full power of modern supercomputers.

Most of the big breakthroughs so far have been in controlled settings, or using problems that we already know the answer to. In any case, reaching quantum supremacy doesnt mean quantum computers are actually ready to do anything useful.

Researchers have made great progress in developing the algorithms that quantum computers will use. But the devices themselves still need a lot more work.

Quantum computing could change the world but right now, its future remains uncertain.

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Quantum computing and quantum supremacy, explained | WIRED UK

IBM researchers have already installed the mounting hardware for a jumbo cryostat big enough to hold a quantum computer with 1 million qubits.

By Adrian ChoSep. 15, 2020 , 5:45 PM

For 20 years scientists and engineers have been saying that someday theyll build a full-fledged quantum computer able to perform useful calculations that would overwhelm any conventional supercomputer. But current machines contain just a few dozen quantum bits, or qubits, too few to do anything dazzling. Today, IBM made its aspirations more concrete by publicly announcing a road map for the development of its quantum computers, including the ambitious goal of building one containing 1000 qubits by 2023. IBMs current largest quantum computer, revealed this month, contains 65 qubits.

Were very excited, says Prineha Narang, co-founder and chief technology officer of Aliro Quantum, a startup that specializes in code that helps higher level software efficiently run on different quantum computers. We didnt know the specific milestones and numbers that theyve announced, she says. The plan includes building intermediate-size machines of 127 and 433 qubits in 2021 and 2022, respectively, and envisions following up with a million-qubit machine at some unspecified date. Dario Gil, IBMs director of research, says he is confident his team can keep to the schedule. A road map is more than a plan and a PowerPoint presentation, he says. Its execution.

IBM is not the only company with a road map to build a full-fledged quantum computera machine that would take advantage of the strange rules of quantum mechanics to breeze through certain computations that just overwhelm conventional computers. At least in terms of public relations, IBMhas been playing catch-up to Google, which 1 year ago grabbed headlines when the company announced its researchers had used their 53-qubit quantum computer to solve a particular abstract problem that they claimed would overwhelm any conventional computerreaching a milestone known as quantum supremacy. Google has its own plan to build a million-qubit quantum computer within 10 years, as Hartmut Neven, who leads Googles quantum computing effort, explained in an April interview, although he declined to reveal a specific timeline for advances.

IBMs declared timeline comes with an obvious risk that everyone will know if it misses its milestones. But the company decided to reveal its plans so that its clients and collaborators would know what to expect. Dozens of quantum-computing startup companies use IBMs current machines to develop their own software products, and knowing IBMs milestones should help developers better tailor their efforts to the hardware, Gil says.

One company joining those efforts is Q-CTRL, which develops software to optimize the control and performance of the individual qubits. The IBM announcement shows venture capitalists the company is serious about developing the challenging technology, says Michael Biercuk, founder and CEO of Q-CTRL. Its relevant to convincing investors that this large hardware manufacturer is pushing hard on this and investing significant resources, he says.

A 1000-qubit machine is a particularly important milestone in the development of a full-fledged quantum computer, researchers say. Such a machine would still be 1000 times too small to fulfill quantum computings full potentialsuch as breaking current internet encryption schemesbut it would big enough to spot and correct the myriad errors that ordinarily plague the finicky quantum bits.

A bit in an ordinary computer is an electrical switch that can be set to either zero or one. In contrast, a qubit is a quantum devicein IBMs and Googles machines, each is a tiny circuit of superconducting metal chilled to nearly absolute zerothat can be set to zero, one, or, thanks to the strange rules of quantum mechanics, zero and one at the same time. But the slightest interaction with the environment tends to distort those delicate two-ways-at-once states, so researchers have developed error-correction protocols to spread information ordinarily encoded in a single physical qubit to many of them in a way that the state of that logical qubit can be maintained indefinitely.

With their planned 1121-qubit machine, IBM researchers would be able to maintain a handful of logical qubits and make them interact, says Jay Gambetta, a physicist who leads IBMs quantum computing efforts. Thats exactly what will be required to start to make a full-fledged quantum computer with thousands of logical qubits. Such a machine would mark an inflection point in which researchers focus would switch from beating down the error rate in the individual qubits to optimizing the architecture and performance of the entire system, Gambetta says.

IBM is already preparing a jumbo liquid-helium refrigerator, or cryostat, to hold a quantum computer with 1 million qubits. The IBM road map doesnt specify when such a machine could be built. But if company researchers really can build a 1000-qubit computer in the next 2 years, that ultimate goal will sound far less fantastical than it does now.

Read the original:
IBM promises 1000-qubit quantum computera milestoneby ...

Our team of scientists, engineers and technicians, have built what is currently the highest performing quantum computer available.

With aquantum volume of 64, the Honeywell quantum computer is twice as powerful as the next alternative in the industry. That means we are closer to industriesleveraging our solutionsto solve computational problems that are impractical to solve with traditional computers.

What makes our quantum computers so powerful is having the highest quality qubits, with the lowest error rates. This is a combination of using identical, fully connected qubits and precision control, said Tony Uttley, president ofHoneywell Quantum Solutions.

To envision what a quantum computer looks like, lets step back in time.

Imagine what you think of computers of 60 years ago looking like where they take up a full room and they have wires running everywhere, Tony said. Were back there.

First, there is an ultra-high vacuum chamber. Its a stainless steel sphere, about the size of a basketball, with portals to allow in laser light, and from which the air has been pumped out such that it contains a vacuum of five times less particles than outer space. The chamber is cryogenically cooled with liquid helium to bring the temperature of the ion trap chip to 10 degrees above absolute zero (approximately negative 441 degrees Fahrenheit, colder than the surface temperature of Pluto).

Within the chamber, electric fields levitate individual atoms 0.1 mm above an ion trap, a silicon chip covered in gold about the size of a quarter. Scientists shine lasers at these positively charged atoms to perform quantum operations.

For context of how small an atom is, if you cup your hands into a sphere, youre holding about a trillion trillion atoms, Tony said.

Meanwhile, there is a lot of equipment to control the quantum computer. Control systems are necessary to precisely manipulate the hundreds of independent electrical signals required to move the ions (qubits) in the intricate dance used for quantum information algorithms. Since the operations are all done with lasers, a multitude of optics are aligned across the optical tables, each specified for the correct color of light. All of this infrastructure takes up roughly two large optical tables (approximately 5 feet wide and 20 feet long), a significant space since the true computing power is harnessed with the few atoms hovering over the trap surface.

Quantum computers harness their power by being able to investigate many potential outcomes at the same time.

Thats where quantum physics comes in.

Traditional computing bits are in a state of either 0 or 1.

On the other hand, Quantum bits, called qubits, can be in both states at the same time, a property called superposition.

That means that when you have these qubits interacting with each other in a computation, you get, what I call, a quantum superpower, Tony said. You get an exponential expansion in the number of values that can all be considered at the same time.

Practically, that means that certain computations that can never be done on even the highest performing supercomputer will one day be computed on a quantum computer. One example is the best path of robots in a distribution center to improve speed of selecting items and packing orders (the best answer even supercomputers cant find!).

Those computations are processed through algorithms designed and developed specifically for quantum computers. These algorithms are similar to classical algorithms from computer science, but also leverage a combination of physics and mathematics expertise. Within quantums ecosystem are a number of quantum-algorithm experts, who specialize in converting real world problems into quantum-standard algorithms. Honeywell Ventures has invested and partnered with two of the companies that do that,Zapata ComputingandCambridge Quantum Computing.

When Honeywell set out to build a quantum computer, we prioritized creatingthe highest quality qubits, focusing on eliminating the errors present within the system on smaller numbers of qubits and then working to scale up the number of qubits. By having achieved such low errors on our quantum operations, with each new qubit we add to the machine, the quantum volume expands.

That increases the capability of quantum computing that we will be able to bring to our customers.

And thanks to a partnership withMicrosofts Azure Quantum, we will be able to offer organizationsaccess to our quantum computerboth directly through our interface as well as through the Azure Quantum portal.

The promise of quantum computing, ultimately, is that instead of getting close, you get exact, Tony said. Youre able to look at all of those different interactions at exactly the same time to get to an optimal solution.

See original here:
The Worlds Highest Performing Quantum Computer is Here

Gillian Tan(Bloomberg) --IonQ is in advanced talks to merge with blank-check company DMY Technology Group Inc. III, according to people with knowledge of the matter, creating one of the first public quantum-computing firms.

The combined company is slated to be worth about $2 billion and a deal is set to be announced in coming weeks, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. Silver Lake, MSD Partners, Bill Gatess Breakthrough Energy and an affiliate of Hyundai Motor Co. are in talks to participate in a so-called strategic private investment in public equity, or PIPE.

Related: Data Center Provider Cyxtera to Go Public Via $3.4B Starboard SPAC Deal

Shares of the SPAC surged 15% at 10:24 a.m. in New York.

DMY Technology is discussing raising additional equity from institutional investors, and new equity from strategic and institutional investors is set to total around $300 million, one of the people said. Existing IonQ investors are expected to roll their equity into the transaction, according to one of the people.

Related: Quantum Teleportation Makes Progress, But Toward What?

As with any deal that hasnt been finalized, its possible terms change or talks fall apart. Representatives for IonQ and DMY declined to comment, as did spokesmen for Silver Lake and MSD Partners. Representatives of Hyundai and Breakthrough Energy Ventures didnt immediately respond to requests for comment.

The SPAC, led by Chairman Harry You and Chief Executive Officer Niccolo De Masi, raised $300 million in November and said at the time it would pursue a target in consumer technology.

College Park, Maryland-based IonQ was founded in 2015 by Chris Monroe and Jungsang Kim and is led by CEO Peter Chapman. Its investors include AmazonWebServices, Samsung Catalyst Fund, GV (formerly known as Google Ventures), NEA, Lockheed Martin Corp., Airbus Ventures and Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH. IonQ in October unveiled what it describes as the worlds most powerful quantum computer.

Quantum has long been touted as the next frontier in technology. Such computers would be capable of simulating and understanding phenomena in the natural world instantly and providing the basis for systems that are unhackable. Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., among other companies, are also working to advance quantum computing. The technology also has potential implications for producing new materials or creating new drugs.

Excerpt from:
Quantum Computing Startup IonQ in Talks to Go Public Through Merger with DMY SPAC - Data Center Knowledge

IBM announced that bp has joined the IBM Quantum Network to advance the use of quantum computing in the energy industry. IBM Quantum is an industry-first initiative to build universal quantum systems for business and science applications.

By joining the IBM Quantum Network as an Industry Partner, bp will have access to IBMs quantum expertise and software and cloud-based access to the most advanced quantum computers available via the cloud. This includes access to a premium 65-qubit quantum computer, the largest universal quantum system available to industry today, and an important milestone on the IBM Quantum roadmap to a 1,000-plus qubit system (IBM Quantum Condor), targeted for the end of 2023.

ExxonMobil and Daimler are also IBM Quantum Network Industry Partners.

bp will work with IBM to explore using quantum computing to solve business and engineering challenges and explore the potential applications for driving efficiencies and reducing carbon emissions.

bps ambition is to become a net zero company by 2050 or sooner and help the world get to net zero. Next-generation computing capabilities such as quantum computing will assist in solving the science and engineering challenges we will face, enabling us to reimagine energy and design new lower carbon products.

Morag Watson, senior vice president, digital science and engineering for bp

Quantum computing has the potential to be applied in areas such as: modeling the chemistry and build-up of various types of clay in hydrocarbon wellsa crucial factor in efficient hydrocarbon production; analyzing and managing the fluid dynamics of wind farms; optimizing autonomous robotic facility inspection; and helping create opportunities not yet imagined to deliver the clean energy the world wants and needs.

In 2020, bp announced its net zero ambition and its new strategy. By the end of this decade, it aims to have developed around 50 gigawatts of net renewable-generating capacity (a 20-fold increase), increased annual low carbon investment 10-fold to around $5 billion and cut its oil and gas production by 40%.

Joining the IBM Quantum Network will enhance bps ability to leverage quantum advances and applications as they emerge and then influence on how those breakthroughs can be applied to its industry and the energy transition.

bp joins a rapidly growing number of clients working with IBM to explore quantum computing to help accelerate the discovery of solutions to some of todays biggest challenges. The energy industry is ripe with opportunities to see value from the use of quantum computing through the discovery of new materials designed to improve the generation, transfer, and storage of energy.

Dario Gil, Senior Vice President and Director of IBM Research

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bp joins the IBM Quantum Network to advance use of quantum computing in energy - Green Car Congress