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As of 2019, the UK is half-way througha ten-year national programme designed to boost quantum technologies, which has so far benefited from a combined 1 billion investment from government and industry. The verdict? Quantum has a lot of potential but we're not sure what for.

Speaking at a conference in London, Claire Cramer, from the US Department of Energy, said: "There is a lot of promise in quantum, but we don't have a transformative solution yet. In reality, we don't know what impact the technology will have."

That is not to say, of course, that the past five years have been a failure. Quite the opposite: researchers around the world can now effectively trial and test quantum technology, because the hardware has been developed. In other words, quantum computers are no longer a feat of the imagination. The devices exist, and that in itself is a milestone.

SEE: Sensor'd enterprise: IoT, ML, and big data (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic)

Earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show, in fact, IBM went to great lengths to remind the public that the IBM Q System One a 20-qubit quantum computer that the company says is capable of performing reliable quantum computations is gaining more momentum among researchers.

The Q System One has been deployed to 15 companies and laboratories so far, as a prototype that research teams can run to work out how quantum computers may be used to solve problems in the future.

Finding out what those problems might be is quantum's next challenge. Liam Blackwell, deputy director at the engineering and physical sciences research council, said: "A lot of money has been invested, and we need to start seeing actual outcomes that will benefit the UK. The challenge now, really, is that we have to deliver."

Research teams are not leaping into the unknown: there are already a few potential applications of quantum technology that have been put forward, ranging from enhancing security with quantum cryptography to improving the accuracy of GPS.

Pharmaceuticals and drug discovery have been identified as fields that could hugely benefit from the new technology as well. Last year, for example, neuroscience firm Biogen partnered with quantum computing research firm 1QBit to better tackle diseases like Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis.

For Cramer, though, this is only scratching the surface. "Look at laser technology, for example," she said. "Seventy years ago, people didn't think lasers could even exist, and now you wouldn't think twice about holding a laser pointer in your hand.

"It's the same thing with quantum. We can't imagine what the transformative applications will be yet; so we need to maintain a culture of discovery."

There is only one secret to achieve a successful "culture of discovery", she continued: research, research, and more research. In the US, for example, the Department of Commerce recently created the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QEDC). Its objectives? To "identify technology solutions" and "highlight use cases and grand challenges to accelerate development efforts".

It is not enough, however, to pump money into labs. Once blue-sky researchers have come up with an unexplored application of quantum, they still have to be able to commercialise their idea and bridging between labs and industry might be easier said than done.

In the UK, the issue is not confined to quantum technology. A recent report by VC company Octopus Ventures showed that trillions of pounds are lost every year because of the difficulty of bringing new ideas from university labs to the stock exchange.

In contrast, in the US, over 26,000 companies started in research teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Combined, these businesses have an annual turnaround of over $2 trillion (1.5 trillion).

"The UK has a very strong lead on research in quantum, but we have lessons to learn from the US," said Elham Kashefi, professor of computer science at the University of Edinburgh. "We need to push research to the next level, to connect it to industry."

SEE: The dark side of IoT, AI and quantum computing: Hacking, data breaches and existential threat

UKRI, an organisation that directs innovation funding through the budget of the department for business, energy and industrial strategy, recently stressed that commercialising quantum technology would be a priority.

The UK organisation invested 20 million in "pioneer funding" for start-ups leveraging quantum technology to develop "products of the future". Four projects benefited from the award to develop prototypes ranging from quantum sensors that can detect objects underground, to encryption tools that keep data safe.

UKRI is now investing another 153 million in new projects, alongside a 205 million investment from industry. Presenting the organisation's plans for the future, UKRI's director for quantum technologies, Roger McKinlay, said: "I don't know what's coming next, but I hope that we can continue to support what I believe is by far the most interesting emerging technology at the moment."

It doesn't seem, therefore, that quantum uncertainty will be resolved anytime soon but it certainly is worth watching this spot.

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Quantum computing has arrived, but we still don't really know what to do with it - ZDNet

On Oct. 23, 2019, Google published a paper in the journal Nature entitled Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor. The tech giant announced its achievement of a much vaunted goal: quantum supremacy.

This perhaps ill-chosen term (coined by physicist John Preskill) is meant to convey the huge speedup that processors based on quantum-mechanical systems are predicted to exhibit, relative to even the fastest classical computers.

Googles benchmark was achieved on a new type of quantum processor, code-named Sycamore, consisting of 54 independently addressable superconducting junction devices (of which only 53 were working for the demonstration).

Each of these devices allows the storage of one bit of quantum information. In contrast to the bits in a classical computer, which can only store one of two states (0 or 1 in the digital language of binary code), a quantum bit qbit can store information in a coherent superposition state which can be considered to contain fractional amounts of both 0 and 1.

Sycamore uses technology developed by the superconductivity research group of physicist John Martinis at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The entire Sycamore system must be kept cold at cryogenic temperatures using special helium dilution refrigeration technology. Because of the immense challenge involved in keeping such a large system near the absolute zero of temperature, it is a technological tour de force.

Contentious findings

The Google researchers demonstrated that the performance of their quantum processor in sampling the output of a pseudo-random quantum circuit was vastly better than a classical computer chip like the kind in our laptops could achieve. Just how vastly became a point of contention, and the story was not without intrigue.

An inadvertent leak of the Google groups paper on the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) occurred a month prior to publication, during the blackout period when Nature prohibits discussion by the authors regarding as-yet-unpublished papers. The lapse was momentary, but long enough that The Financial Times, The Verge and other outlets picked up the story.

A well-known quantum computing blog by computer scientist Scott Aaronson contained some oblique references to the leak. The reason for this obliqueness became clear when the paper was finally published online and Aaronson could at last reveal himself to be one of the reviewers.

Challenges to Googles story

The story had a further controversial twist when the Google groups claims were immediately countered by IBMs quantum computing group. IBM shared a preprint posted on the ArXiv (an online repository for academic papers that have yet to go through peer review) and a blog post dated Oct. 21, 2019 (note the date!).

While the Google group had claimed that a classical (super)computer would require 10,000 years to simulate the same 53-qbit random quantum circuit sampling task that their Sycamore processor could do in 200 seconds, the IBM researchers showed a method that could reduce the classical computation time to a mere matter of days.

However, the IBM classical computation would have to be carried out on the worlds fastest supercomputer the IBM-developed Summit OLCF-4 at Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee with clever use of secondary storage to achieve this benchmark.

While of great interest to researchers like myself working on hardware technologies related to quantum information, and important in terms of establishing academic bragging rights, the IBM-versus-Google aspect of the story is probably less relevant to the general public interested in all things quantum.

For the average citizen, the mere fact that a 53-qbit device could beat the worlds fastest supercomputer (containing more than 10,000 multi-core processors) is undoubtedly impressive. Now we must try to imagine what may come next.

Quantum futures

The reality of quantum computing today is that very impressive strides have been made on the hardware front. A wide array of credible quantum computing hardware platforms now exist, including ion traps, superconducting device arrays similar to those in Googles Sycamore system and isolated electrons trapped in NV-centres in diamond.

These and other systems are all now in play, each with benefits and drawbacks. So far researchers and engineers have been making steady technological progress in developing these different hardware platforms for quantum computing.

What has lagged quite a bit behind are custom-designed algorithms (computer programs) designed to run on quantum computers and able to take full advantage of possible quantum speed-ups. While several notable quantum algorithms exist Shors algorithm for factorization, for example, which has applications in cryptography, and Grovers algorithm, which might prove useful in database search applications the total set of quantum algorithms remains rather small.

Much of the early interest (and funding) in quantum computing was spurred by the possibility of quantum-enabled advances in cryptography and code-breaking. A huge number of online interactions ranging from confidential communications to financial transactions require secure and encrypted messages, and modern cryptography relies on the difficulty of factoring large numbers to achieve this encryption.

Quantum computing could be very disruptive in this space, as Shors algorithm could make code-breaking much faster, while quantum-based encryption methods would allow detection of any eavesdroppers.

The interest various agencies have in unbreakable codes for secure military and financial communications has been a major driver of research in quantum computing. It is worth noting that all these code-making and code-breaking applications of quantum computing ignore to some extent the fact that no system is perfectly secure; there will always be a backdoor, because there will always be a non-quantum human element that can be compromised.

Quantum applications

More appealing for the non-espionage and non-hacker communities in other words, the rest of us are the possible applications of quantum computation to solve very difficult problems that are effectively unsolvable using classical computers.

Ironically, many of these problems emerge when we try to use classical computers to solve quantum-mechanical problems, such as quantum chemistry problems that could be relevant for drug design and various challenges in condensed matter physics including a number related to high-temperature superconductivity.

So where are we in the wonderful and wild world of quantum computation?

In recent years, we have had many convincing demonstrations that qbits can be created, stored, manipulated and read using a number of futuristic-sounding quantum hardware platforms. But the algorithms lag. So while the prospect of quantum computing is fascinating, it will likely be a long time before we have quantum equivalents of the silicon chips that power our versatile modern computing devices.

Michael Bradley, Professor of Physics & Engineering Physics, University of Saskatchewan.This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Media: Reuters

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IBM Just Called Out Google Over Their "Quantum Computer" - The National Interest Online

Heres a batch of fresh news and announcements from across Imperial.

From a new project to preserve safe havens for salmon, to Imperial researchers analysing the extent of the coronavirus outbreak, here is some quick-read news from across the College.

The population of Wild North Atlantic Salmon is now at its lowest level ever recorded, inspiring the new Six Rivers Project, led by the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute (MFRI) Iceland and Imperial College London, and funded by Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos.

The project, which had its inaugural conference this month, is focused on preserving both the land and river ecosystems across six rivers in northeast Iceland, supporting one of the last safe havens where salmon populations still thrive.

Imperials Professor Guy Woodward said: The North Atlantic Salmon is a keystone species in the ecosystem. Icelands rivers have simple ecosystems providing ideal research conditions. Their latitude also brings with it a potential sensitivity to the effects of climate change, more so than in other parts of the world.

Read more about the inaugural conference of the Six Rivers Project.

Provost Ian Walmsley discussed the future of quantum computing at the Digital-Life-Design (DLD) conference in Munich.

He made the case for globalcollaboration in the race to develop a viable quantum computer, and spoke to German media, including BR24.

Other participants in DLD, one of the worlds most important technology events, included Nick Clegg, Ursula von der Leyen and Garry Kasparov.

The first Photonics Online Meetup a free, online-only global conference for photonics researchers went ahead with great success this month.

The five-hour-long conference on 13 January 2020 brought together 1,100 researchers in 37 countries across six continents in real time. More than 635 of these researchers gathered at 66 local hubs in 27 countries to join in together.

There was also a Twitter-based poster session, with 59 virtual posters averaging 3,000 views each. Videos of the event are now available online, with around 150 people downloading the videos in the first 24 hours.

Read more at the Photonics Online Meetup.

The Early Years Centre (EYC) has reopened after an extensive refurbishment. Staff, parents and children attended the opening event on Thursday 16 January.

Tracy Halsey, Early Years Centre Manager, thanked staff for their efforts, and Professor Emma McCoy, Early Years Committee chair, declared the new centre open with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

This 8m investment has expand the EYCs capacity, creating an additional 56 places and refurbishing the existing indoor and outdoor space. The extra places are being introduced in response to the growing demand for affordable childcare onsite. The EYC can offer places to over 200 children and will reduce the average waiting time for a place. The EYC will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary this year.

Read more about the project on our news site.

Pembridge Hall has become one of the top halls in the UK to complete the Student Switch Off campaigns climate change quiz. Over 1,000 Imperial students took the quiz with over 500 pledging to save energy, water and recycle. Pembridge Hall will receive 50 tubs of Ben & Jerrys ice cream as their reward.

The Student Switch Off campaign, aimed at encouraging sustainability, also includes a microgrant scheme which gives students funding to organise their own pro-environmental activities. Imperial undergraduate, Lauren Wheeler, has become the first student in the UK to receive a microgrant to run an event she will raise funds to help those affected by the recent wildfires in Australia.

The hall that gets the most student engagement over the year will receive 250 for their hall committee. The campaign will continue this term.

Imperial researchers are helping with the global response to the spread of coronavirus. They are also leading voices on the matter in the media worldwide, appearing in over a thousand media articles and broadcast news packages about the outbreak.

An ongoing series of reports from the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis and J-IDEA at Imperial is looking at the number of cases and understanding the transmissibility of the disease. Other researchers at the College are working on areas including vaccine development and helping the UK to respond.

Commentary from eleven Imperial experts has featured in global outlets including the BBC World Service, CNN, andNew York Times.

For further updates, visit the Centres website.

Want to be kept up to date on news at Imperial?

Sign up for our free quick-read daily e-newsletter, Imperial Today.

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Saving salmon and coronavirus outbreak: News from the College | Imperial News - Imperial College London

This is the first in a series of explainers on quantum technology. The other two are on quantum communication and post-quantum cryptography.

A quantum computer harnesses some of the almost-mystical phenomena of quantum mechanics to deliver huge leaps forward in processing power. Quantum machines promise to outstrip even the most capable of todaysand tomorrowssupercomputers.

They wont wipe out conventional computers, though. Using a classical machine will still be the easiest and most economical solution for tackling most problems. But quantum computers promise to power exciting advances in various fields, from materials science to pharmaceuticals research. Companies are already experimenting with them to develop things like lighter and more powerful batteries for electric cars, and to help create novel drugs.

The secret to a quantum computers power lies in its ability to generate and manipulate quantum bits, or qubits.

What is a qubit?

Today's computers use bitsa stream of electrical or optical pulses representing1s or0s. Everything from your tweets and e-mails to your iTunes songs and YouTube videos are essentially long strings of these binary digits.

Quantum computers, on the other hand, usequbits, whichare typically subatomic particles such as electrons or photons. Generating and managing qubits is a scientific and engineering challenge. Some companies, such as IBM, Google, and Rigetti Computing, use superconducting circuits cooled to temperatures colder than deep space. Others, like IonQ, trap individual atoms in electromagnetic fields on a silicon chip in ultra-high-vacuum chambers. In both cases, the goal is to isolate the qubits in a controlled quantum state.

Qubits have some quirky quantum properties that mean a connected group of them can provide way more processing power than the same number of binary bits. One of those properties is known as superposition and another is called entanglement.

Qubits can represent numerous possible combinations of 1and 0 at the same time. This ability to simultaneously be in multiple states is called superposition. To put qubits into superposition, researchers manipulate them using precision lasers or microwave beams.

Thanks to this counterintuitive phenomenon, a quantum computer with several qubits in superposition can crunch through a vast number of potential outcomes simultaneously. The final result of a calculation emerges only once the qubits are measured, which immediately causes their quantum state to collapse to either 1or 0.

Researchers can generate pairs of qubits that are entangled, which means the two members of a pair exist in a single quantum state. Changing the state of one of the qubits will instantaneously change the state of the other one in a predictable way. This happens even if they are separated by very long distances.

Nobody really knows quite how or why entanglement works. It even baffled Einstein, who famously described it as spooky action at a distance. But its key to the power of quantum computers. In a conventional computer, doubling the number of bits doubles its processing power. But thanks to entanglement, adding extra qubits to a quantum machine produces an exponential increase in its number-crunching ability.

Quantum computers harness entangled qubits in a kind of quantum daisy chain to work their magic. The machines ability to speed up calculations using specially designed quantum algorithms is why theres so much buzz about their potential.

Thats the good news. The bad news is that quantum machines are way more error-prone than classical computers because of decoherence.

The interaction of qubits with their environment in ways that cause their quantum behavior to decay and ultimately disappear is called decoherence. Their quantum state is extremely fragile. The slightest vibration or change in temperaturedisturbances known as noise in quantum-speakcan cause them to tumble out of superposition before their job has been properly done. Thats why researchers do their best to protect qubits from the outside world in those supercooled fridges and vacuum chambers.

But despite their efforts, noise still causes lots of errors to creep into calculations. Smart quantum algorithmscan compensate for some of these, and adding more qubits also helps. However, it will likely take thousands of standard qubits to create a single, highly reliable one, known as a logical qubit. This will sap a lot of a quantum computers computational capacity.

And theres the rub: so far, researchers havent been able to generate more than 128 standard qubits (see our qubit counter here). So were still many years away from getting quantum computers that will be broadly useful.

That hasnt dented pioneers hopes of being the first to demonstrate quantum supremacy.

What is quantum supremacy?

Its the point at which a quantum computer can complete a mathematical calculation that is demonstrably beyond the reach of even the most powerful supercomputer.

Its still unclear exactly how many qubits will be needed to achieve this because researchers keep finding new algorithms to boost the performance of classical machines, and supercomputing hardware keeps getting better. But researchers and companies are working hard to claim the title, running testsagainst some of the worlds most powerful supercomputers.

Theres plenty of debate in the research world about just how significant achieving this milestone will be. Rather than wait for supremacy to be declared, companies are already starting to experiment with quantum computers made by companies like IBM, Rigetti, and D-Wave, a Canadian firm. Chinese firms like Alibaba are also offering access to quantum machines. Some businesses are buying quantum computers, while others are using ones made available through cloud computing services.

Where is a quantum computer likely to be most useful first?

One of the most promising applications of quantum computers is for simulating the behavior of matterdown to the molecular level. Auto manufacturers like Volkswagen and Daimler are using quantum computers to simulate the chemical composition of electrical-vehicle batteries to help find new ways to improve their performance. And pharmaceutical companies are leveraging them to analyze and compare compounds that could lead to the creation of new drugs.

The machines are also great for optimization problems because they can crunch through vast numbers of potential solutions extremely fast. Airbus, for instance, is using them to help calculate the most fuel-efficient ascent and descent paths for aircraft. And Volkswagen has unveiled a service that calculates the optimal routes for buses and taxis in cities in order to minimize congestion. Some researchers also think the machines could be used to accelerate artificial intelligence.

It could take quite a few years for quantum computers to achieve their full potential. Universities and businesses working on them are facing a shortage of skilled researchersin the fieldand a lack of suppliersof some key components. But if these exotic new computing machines live up to their promise, they could transform entire industries and turbocharge global innovation.

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Explainer: What is a quantum computer? - MIT Technology Review

The massive amount of processing power generated by computer manufacturers has not yet been able to quench our thirst for speed and computing capacity. In 1947, American computer engineer Howard Aiken said that just six electronic digital computers would satisfy the computing needs of the United States. Others have made similar errant predictions about the amount of computing power that would support our growing technological needs. Of course, Aiken didn't count on the large amounts of data generated by scientific research, the proliferation of personal computers or the emergence of the Internet, which have only fueled our need for more, more and more computing power.

Will we ever have the amount of computing power we need or want? If, as Moore's Law states, the number of transistors on a microprocessor continues to double every 18 months, the year 2020 or 2030 will find the circuits on a microprocessor measured on an atomic scale. And the logical next step will be to create quantum computers, which will harness the power of atoms and molecules to perform memory and processing tasks. Quantum computers have the potential to perform certain calculations significantly faster than any silicon-based computer.

Scientists have already built basic quantum computers that can perform certain calculations; but a practical quantum computer is still years away. In this article, you'll learn what a quantum computer is and just what it'll be used for in the next era of computing.

You don't have to go back too far to find the origins of quantum computing. While computers have been around for the majority of the 20th century, quantum computing was first theorized less than 30 years ago, by a physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory. Paul Benioff is credited with first applying quantum theory to computers in 1981. Benioff theorized about creating a quantum Turing machine. Most digital computers, like the one you are using to read this article, are based on the Turing Theory. Learn what this is in the next section.

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How Quantum Computers Work | HowStuffWorks