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IQM Quantum Computers, a global leader in building quantum computers, has reached significant milestones in superconducting quantum computing, demonstrating improvements in two key metrics characterising the quality of quantum computer.

A record low error rate for two-qubit operations was achieved by demonstrating a CZ gate between two qubits with (99.91 +- 0.02) % fidelity, which was validated by interleaved randomised benchmarking. Achieving high two-qubit gate fidelity is the most fundamental and hardest to achieve characteristic of a quantum processor, essential for generating entangled states between qubits and executing quantum algorithms.

Furthermore, qubit relaxation time T1 of 0.964 +- 0.092 milliseconds and dephasing time T2 echo of 1.155 +- 0.188 milliseconds was demonstrated on a planar transmon qubit on a silicon chip fabricated inIQMs own fabrication facilities. The coherence times, characterised by the relaxation time T1 and the dephasing time T2 echo, are among the key metrics for assessing the performance of a single qubit, as they indicate how long quantum information can be stored in a physical qubit.

These major results show that IQMs fabrication technology has matured and is ready to support the next generation of IQMs high-performance quantum processors. The results followIQMs recent benchmark announcementsand indicate significant potential for further advancements on gate fidelities essential for fault-tolerant quantum computing and processors with higher qubit counts.

The improvements in the two characteristics, two-qubit gate fidelity and coherence time, allow the quantum computer to be developed for more complex use cases. The significance of these results stems from the fact that only very few organisations have achieved comparable performance numbers before.

The results were achieved through innovations in materials and fabrication technology and required top-notch performance across all components of the quantum computer, including QPU design, control optimisation, and system engineering.

This achievement cements our tech leadership in the industry. Our quantum processor quality is world-class, and these results show that we have a good opportunity of going beyond that,saidDr. Juha Hassel, theVice President of Engineering at IQM Quantum Computers.

Hassel explained that the company is on track with its technology roadmap and is actively exploring potential use cases in machine learning, cybersecurity, route optimisation, quantum sensor simulation, chemistry, and pharmaceutical research.

This announcement comes on the heels of the launch of Germanysfirst hybrid quantum computerat the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Munich, for which IQM led the integration with its 20-qubit quantum processing unit, and the opening of theIQM quantum data centrein Munich.

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IQM Quantum Computers Achieves Technological Milestones With 99.9% 2-Qubit Gate Fidelity And 1 Millisecond Coherence Time - The Quantum Insider

According to the 2023 Queensland Quantum and Advanced Technologies Strategy, there will be 8700 jobs in quantum computing in Australia by 2030 in the fields of energy, decarbonisation, health and biotechnology, defence and aerospace.

The five universities are the University of Queensland, Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology, University of Southern Queensland and the University of the Sunshine Coast.

PsiQuantum, based in Palo Alto, California, was founded in 2016 by two UQ graduates, Jeremy OBrien and Terry Rudolph, while they worked at the University of Bristol.

A quantum computer is designed to solve complex problems in chemistry, maths and physics beyond the scope of conventional computers.

Quantum computers could revolutionise the development of drugs, materials and sustainable energy solutions, unlocking innovations that would otherwise remain unreachable.

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UQ vice-chancellor Professor Deborah Terry said quantum physics impact on education would stretch from high schools into research.

Students starting high school this year will graduate into a world with utility-scale quantum computers, Terry said.

We will work with PsiQuantum across the education spectrum from schools, through TAFE, to universities to prepare our students for future jobs in quantum and advanced technologies.

Griffith Universitys vice-chancellor, Professor Carolyn Evans, said the consortium would be a new frontier for students.

Read more from the original source:
Think big: Computer the size of Suncorp Stadium to take shape near airport - Brisbane Times

Enlarge / A single logical qubit is built from a large collection of hardware qubits.

One of the more striking things about quantum computing is that the field, despite not having proven itself especially useful, has already spawned a collection of startups that are focused on building something other than qubits. It might be easy to dismiss this as opportunismtrying to cash in on the hype surrounding quantum computing. But it can be useful to look at the things these startups are targeting, because they can be an indication of hard problems in quantum computing that haven't yet been solved by any one of the big companies involved in that spacecompanies like Amazon, Google, IBM, or Intel.

In the case of a UK-based company called Riverlane, the unsolved piece that is being addressed is the huge amount of classical computations that are going to be necessary to make the quantum hardware work. Specifically, it's targeting the huge amount of data processing that will be needed for a key part of quantum error correction: recognizing when an error has occurred.

All qubits are fragile, tending to lose their state during operations, or simply over time. No matter what the technologycold atoms, superconducting transmons, whateverthese error rates put a hard limit on the amount of computation that can be done before an error is inevitable. That rules out doing almost every useful computation operating directly on existing hardware qubits.

The generally accepted solution to this is to work with what are called logical qubits. These involve linking multiple hardware qubits together and spreading the quantum information among them. Additional hardware qubits are linked in so that they can be measured to monitor errors affecting the data, allowing them to be corrected. It can take dozens of hardware qubits to make a single logical qubit, meaning even the largest existing systems can only support about 50 robust logical qubits.

Riverlane's founder and CEO, Steve Brierley, told Ars that error correction doesn't only stress the qubit hardware; it stresses the classical portion of the system as well. Each of the measurements of the qubits used for monitoring the system needs to be processed to detect and interpret any errors. We'll need roughly 100 logical qubits to do some of the simplest interesting calculations, meaning monitoring thousands of hardware qubits. Doing more sophisticated calculations may mean thousands of logical qubits.

That error-correction data (termed syndrome data in the field) needs to be read between each operation, which makes for a lot of data. "At scale, we're talking a hundred terabytes per second," said Brierley. "At a million physical qubits, we'll be processing about a hundred terabytes per second, which is Netflix global streaming."

It also has to be processed in real time, otherwise computations will get held up waiting for error correction to happen. To avoid that, errors must be detected in real time. For transmon-based qubits, syndrome data is generated roughly every microsecond, so real time means completing the processing of the datapossibly Terabytes of itwith a frequency of around a Megahertz. And Riverlane was founded to provide hardware that's capable of handling it.

The system the company has developed is described in a paper that it has posted on the arXiv. It's designed to handle syndrome data after other hardware has already converted the analog signals into digital form. This allows Riverlane's hardware to sit outside any low-temperature hardware that's needed for some forms of physical qubits.

That data is run through an algorithm the paper terms a "Collision Clustering decoder," which handles the error detection. To demonstrate its effectiveness, they implement it based on a typical Field Programmable Gate Array from Xilinx, where it occupies only about 5 percent of the chip but can handle a logical qubit built from nearly 900 hardware qubits (simulated, in this case).

The company also demonstrated a custom chip that handled an even larger logical qubit, while only occupying a tiny fraction of a square millimeter and consuming just 8 milliwatts of power.

Both of these versions are highly specialized; they simply feed the error information for other parts of the system to act on. So, it is a highly focused solution. But it's also quite flexible in that it works with various error-correction codes. Critically, it also integrates with systems designed to control a qubit based on very different physics, including cold atoms, trapped ions, and transmons.

"I think early on it was a bit of a puzzle," Brierley said. "You've got all these different types of physics; how are we going to do this?" It turned out not to be a major challenge. "One of our engineers was in Oxford working with the superconducting qubits, and in the afternoon he was working with the ion trap qubits. He came back to Cambridge and he was all excited. He was like, 'They're using the same control electronics.'" It turns out that, regardless of the physics involved in controlling the qubits, everybody had borrowed the same hardware from a different field (Brierley said it was a Xilinx radiofrequency system-on-a-chip built for 5G base stationed prototyping.) That makes it relatively easy to integrate Riverlane's custom hardware with a variety of systems.

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Why every quantum computer will need a powerful classical computer - Ars Technica

A new quantum computer has broken a world record in "quantum supremacy," topping the performance of benchmarking set by Google's Sycamore machine by 100-fold.

Using the new 56-qubit H2-1 computer, scientists at quantum computing company Quantinuum ran various experiments to benchmark the machine's performance levels and the quality of the qubits used. They published their results June 4 in a study uploaded to the preprint database arXiv. The study has not been peer-reviewed yet.

To demonstrate the potential of the quantum computer, the scientists at Quantinuum used a well-known algorithm to measure how noisy, or error-prone, qubits were.

Quantum computers can perform calculations in parallel thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics and entanglement between qubits, meaning the fates of different qubits can instantly change each other. Classical computers, by contrast, can work only in sequence.

Adding more qubits to a system also scales up the power of a machine exponentially; scientists predict that quantum computers will one day perform complex calculations in seconds that a classical supercomputer would have taken thousands of years to solve.

The point where quantum computers overtake classical ones is known as "quantum supremacy," but achieving this milestone in a practical way would need a quantum computer with millions of qubits. The largest machine today has only about 1,000 qubits.

Related: Quantum computing breakthrough could happen with just hundreds, not millions, of qubits using new error-correction system

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The reason we would need so many qubits for "quantum supremacy" is that they are inherently prone to error, so many would be needed to correct those errors. That's why many researchers are now focusing on building more reliable qubits, rather than simply adding more qubits to machines.

The team tested the fidelity of H2-1's output using what's known as the linear cross entropy benchmark (XEB). XEB spits out results between 0 (none of the output is error-free) and 1 (completely error-free), Quantinuum representatives said in a statement.

Scientists at Google first tested the company's Sycamore quantum computer using XEB in 2019, demonstrating that it could complete a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken the most powerful supercomputer at the time 10,000 years to finish. They registered an XEB result of approximately 0.002 with the 53 superconducting qubits built into Sycamore.

But in the new study, Quantinuum scientists in partnership with JPMorgan, Caltech and Argonne National Laboratory achieved an XEB score of approximately 0.35. This means the H2 quantum computer can produce results without producing an error 35% of the time.

"We are entirely focused on the path to universal fault tolerant quantum computers," Ilyas Khan, chief product officer at Quantinuum and founder of Cambridge Quantum Computing, said in the statement. "This objective has not changed, but what has changed in the past few months is clear evidence of the advances that have been made possible due to the work and the investment that has been made over many, many years."

Quantinuum previously collaborated with Microsoft to demonstrate "logical qubits" that had an error rate 800 times lower than physical qubits.

In the study, published in April, scientists demonstrated they could run experiments with the logical qubits with an error rate of just 1 in 100,000 which is much stronger than the 1-in-100 error rate of physical qubits, Microsoft representatives said.

"These results show that whilst the full benefits of fault tolerant quantum computers have not changed in nature, they may be reachable earlier than was originally expected," added Khan.

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New quantum computer smashes 'quantum supremacy' record by a factor of 100 and it consumes 30,000 times less power - Livescience.com

Jeremy OBrien, CEO of PsiQuantum, is developing the worlds first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer. At the Third Annual Commercialising Quantum Global event hosted by The Economist, OBrien discussed quantum computing, detailing the path PsiQuantum is taking and the exciting potential of their technology.

OBrien explained that fault-tolerant quantum computers are essential because errors are inevitable in quantum systems.

Things go wrong in a regular computer as well, but they go wrong at a rate thats so low that we typically dont have to worry about error correction, OBrien said.

In quantum computing, however, the error rates are higher, necessitating robust error correction methods to ensure useful computations. PsiQuantums approach diverges from many in the field by focusing on building a large-scale, fault-tolerant system from the outset.

OBrien underlined this: We took that approach because it was our belief that all of the utility, all of the commercial value, would come with those large-scale systems with error correction. He added: There will be no utility in those small noisy systems that we have back then and indeed today.

PsiQuantum is leveraging photonics and the existing semiconductor manufacturing industry to achieve their ambitious goals. OBrien described their strategy: We spent 20 years in the University Research environment trying to figure out if there was a path whereby, we could use the semiconductor industry and the computer systems industry in full to make a quantum computer. He noted that their conviction is based on the extraordinary manufacturing capabilities developed over decades, which produce a trillion chips a year, each containing billions of components.

The companys first major project is the development of a fault-tolerant quantum computer in Brisbane, scheduled for completion in 2027. OBrien detailed the setup: Its a system with of order 100 cabinets, each filled with hundreds of silicon chips, half of them photonic, half of them electronic, all wired up electrically as well as optically using conventional telecommunication fibers. This system, when operational, is expected to address significant problems across various industries, particularly in sustainability.

OBrien highlighted the potential impact on battery technology.

Although everyone as far as I can tell has a lithium-ion battery in their hand right now, we dont understand how those things work, he said, while explaining that understanding and simulating the chemistry of these batteries is beyond the capability of conventional computers. Quantum computers, however, could unlock new insights, leading to the design of better batteries and other advanced materials.

The pharmaceutical industry is another area poised to benefit.

We have drugs that we consume which we dont know how they work, OBrien said, pointing out the limitations of current simulation capabilities. Quantum computers could revolutionize drug development by accurately simulating molecular interactions, significantly speeding up the discovery process and improving drug efficacy.

PsiQuantums use of photonics on silicon chips is a key factor in their accelerated timeline. OBrien explained: Photonics is an approach that enables you to scale in large part because of the leverage of the manufacturing but also the connectivity and the cooling and control electronics. This innovative approach allows for rapid development and deployment of their quantum systems.

As PsiQuantum moves towards their 2027 goal, OBrien is already looking ahead.

We have plans for the next generation of systems that will be bigger and more capable, he said, which indicates a future of continuous improvement and expansion in quantum computing capabilities.

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Quantum Computings Next Frontier, A Conversation with Jeremy OBrien - The Quantum Insider