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Researchers have made a breakthrough in quantum technology development that has the potential to leave todays supercomputers in the dust, opening the door to advances in fields including medicine, chemistry, cybersecurity and others that have been out of reach.

In a study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, researchers from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia said they found a way to create quantum computing processors in silicon chips.

Principal investigator Stephanie Simmons said they illuminated tiny imperfections on the silicon chips with intense beams of light. The defects in the silicon chips act as a carrier of information, she said. While the rest of the chip transmits the light, the tiny defect reflects it back and turns into a messenger, she said.

There are many naturally occurring imperfections in silicon. Some of these imperfections can act as quantum bits, or qubits. Scientists call those kinds of imperfections spin qubits. Past research has shown that silicon can produce some of the most stable and long-lived qubits in the industry.

These results unlock immediate opportunities to construct silicon-integrated, telecommunications-band quantum information networks, said the study.

Simmons, who is the universitys Canada Research Chair in silicon quantum technologies, said the main challenge with quantum computing was being able to send information to and from qubits.

People have worked with spin qubits, or defects, in silicon before, Simmons said. And people have worked with photon qubits in silicon before. But nobodys brought them together like this.

Lead author Daniel Higginbottom called the breakthrough immediately promising because researchers achieved what was considered impossible by combining two known but parallel fields.

Silicon defects were extensively studied from the 1970s through the 90s while quantum physics has been researched for decades, said Higginbottom, who is a post-doctoral fellow at the universitys physics department.

For the longest time people didnt see any potential for optical technology in silicon defects. But weve really pioneered revisiting these and have found something with applications in quantum technology thats certainly remarkable.

Although in an embryonic stage, Simmons said quantum computing is the rock n roll future of computers that can solve anything from simple algebra problems to complex pharmaceutical equations or formulas that unlock deep mysteries of space.

Were going to be limited by our imaginations at this stage. Whats really going to take off is really far outside our predictive capabilities as humans.

The advantage of using silicon chips is that they are widely available, understood and have a giant manufacturing base, she said.

We can really get it working and we should be able to move more quickly and hopefully bring that capability mainstream much faster.

Some physicists predict quantum computers will become mainstream in about two decades, although Simmons said she thinks it will be much sooner.

In the 1950s, people thought the technology behind transistors was mainly going to be used for hearing aids, she said. No one then predicted that the physics behind a transistor could be applied to Facebook or Google, she added.

So, well have to see how quantum technology plays out over decades in terms of what applications really do resonate with the public, she said. But there is going to be a lot because people are creative, and these are fundamentally very powerful tools that were unlocking.

Hina Alam, The Canadian Press

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Old computer technology points the way to future of quantum computing - Saanich News

Quantum Source Secures $15 Million in Seed Round Funding to Develop Photonic Quantum Computer Technology that Can Scale to Millions of Qubits

Israel based Quantum Source has received $15 Million in venture funding from Grove Ventures,Pitango First, andEclipse Ventures. They are developing technology for a large quantum computer based upon photonic technology. Photonic technologies have potential advantages over other technologies because they run at room temperatures, can potentially be built with chips manufactured in a standard semiconductor fabrication facility, are easier to network using optical fiber optic cables, can potentially take advantage of photonic components and other infrastructure developed for the telecommunications industry, and are less affected by external environmental factors that can destroy qubit fidelity and coherence. However, one of the biggest challenges is to implement two qubit gates.

Quantum Source has a goal of developing photonic quantum computing technology that can be scaled to millions of qubits. There are other companies that are pursuing a similar strategy with photonic technology, but Quantum Source is using a unique technology that uses something called photon-atom gates that could potentially give them an advantage. A key characteristic of the photon-atom gate is can provide a entangling two-qubit gate which is deterministic. The key concept of the photon-atom gate is it uses a single-photon Rman interaction with a single atom near a nanofibre-couple microresonator. Other photonic approaches can also implement photonic gates, but those may be probabilistic in nature. They can get around a gate which is probabilistic in nature by using a try until you succeed approach, but Quantum Source contends that by using a deterministic gate to begin with they will be able to create systems that are smaller, less complex, and lower in cost by several orders of magnitude. This approach has come out of research developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Additional technical papers describing the technology can be found here, here, and here.

Quantum Source may also benefit by having several members of their senior management team come from deep backgrounds in the semiconductor industry with extensive experience in developing chip level products that are built in semiconductor wafer fabs. CEO Oded Melamed was the former CEO of Altair Semiconductor which was acquired by Sony Corporation in 2016 for $212 million, VP of R&D Gil Semo was the Director of VLSI for Anobit which was acquired by Apple in 2012, and Chairman Dan Charash was the CEO of Provigent, which was acquired by Broadcom in 2011 for $300 million. Filling out that management team is Professor Barak Dayan of the Weizmann Institute who helped to originally develop some of the key technical concepts.

You can access the press release from Quantum Source announcing the new funding here.

July 12, 2022

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Quantum Source Secures $15 Million in Seed Round Funding to Develop Photonic Quantum Computer Technology that Can Scale to Millions of Qubits -...

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Infineon and Oxford Ionics have announced a collaboration to develop a fully integrated quantum processing unit (QPU). The quantum computer is based on trapped-ion technology. The companies aim to offer hundreds of qubits within the next few years, in order to to transition the technology from research to industrial applications.

Building industrial applications requires qubits with low error levels that can be built at massive scale. To address these requirements, the companies tout that with the partnership they will be able to combine Oxford Ionics unique electronic qubit control (EQC) with Infineons expertise in engineering, manufacturing and quantum technology. The companies claim that the EQC technology offers a path to integrate trapped ion qubits into Infineons semiconductor processes.

Since trapped ions are the leading technology, as measured by low quantum error levels, and semiconductor processes solve the scaling problem, this could offer the best of both worlds, explained Chris Ballance, cofounder of Oxford Ionics.

The great challenge in quantum computing is scaling whilst improving performance. There are technologies that can be fabricated at scale but dont perform, and there are technologies that perform but dont scale. Our electronic control is uniquely placed to do both. Working with Infineon and its mature and flexible semiconductor process allows us to speed up the accessibility of a commercial QPU. Due to our market-leading low error rates, these processors need dramatically fewer qubits to solve useful problems than other technologies.

The first Oxford Ionics devices will be available in the cloud by the end of 2022. A fully integrated system with hundreds of qubits is planned within two years. Within five years, the companies aim to create a fully integrated QPU that can then be networked together into a quantum supercomputer using Oxford Ionicss quantum networking technology.

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Infineon and Trapped Ionics enter the quantum computing race - VentureBeat

Abu Dhabi: At the heart of Abu Dhabis science research hub in Masdar, a new era of computing is taking shape. With massive investments towards becoming a leader in the field, Abu Dhabi could well revolutionise quantum computing when a newly-developed foundry starts churning out quantum chips this summer.

With the world of computing still undecided on which platform works best to enable, and then scale up, quantum computing, chips manufactured at the laboratory will allow important experiments into the possibilities of various material and configurations.

Quantum foundry

The laboratory is part of the Quantum Research Centre, one of a number of research interests at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), which focuses on applied research and is part of the over-arching Advanced Technology Research Council in Abu Dhabi.

TII Quantum Foundry will be the first quantum device fabrication facility in the UAE. At the moment, it is still under construction. We are installing the last of the tools needed to manufacture superconducting quantum chips. We are hoping that it will be ready soon, and hopefully by then, we can start manufacturing the first quantum chips in the UAE, Alvaro Orgaz, lead for the quantum computing control at the TIIs Quantum Research Centre, told Gulf News.

The design of quantum chips is an area of active research at the moment. We are also interested in this. So, we will manufacture our chips and install them into our quantum refrigerators, then test them and improve on each iteration of the chip, he explained.

What is quantum computing?

Classical computers process information in bits, tiny on and off switches that are encoded in zeroes and ones. In contrast, quantum computing uses qubits as the fundamental unit of information.

Unlike classical bits, qubits can take advantage of a quantum mechanical effect called superposition where they exist as 1 and 0 at the same time. One qubit cannot always be described independently of the state of the others either, in a phenomenon called entanglement. The capacity of a quantum computer increases exponentially with the number of qubits. The efficient usage of quantum entanglement drastically enhances the capacity of a quantum computer to be able to deal with challenging problems, explained Professor Dr Jos Ignacio Latorre, chief researcher at the Quantum Research Center.

Why quantum computing?

When quantum computers were first proposed in the 1980s and 1990s, the aim was to help computing for certain complex systems such as molecules that cannot be accurately depicted with classical algorithms.

Quantum effects translate well to complex computations in some fields like pharmaceuticals, material sciences, as well as optimisation processes that are important in aviation, oil and gas, the energy sector and the financial sector. In a classical computer, you can have one configuration of zeroes and ones or another. But in a quantum system, you can have many configurations of zeroes and ones processed simultaneously in a superposition state. This is the fundamental reason why quantum computers can solve some complex computational tasks more efficiently than classical computers, said Dr Leandro Aolita, executive director of quantum algorithms at the Quantum Research Centre.

Complementing classical computing

On a basic level, this means that quantum computers will not replace classical computers; they will complement them.

There are some computational problems in which quantum computers will offer no speed-up. There are only some problems where they will be superior. So, you would not use a quantum computer which is designed for high-performance computing to write an email, the researcher explained. This is why, in addition to research, the TII is also working with industry partners to see which computational problems may translate well to quantum computing and the speed-up this may provide, once the computers are mature enough to process them.

Quantum effect fragility

At this stage, the simplest quantum computer is already operational at the QRC laboratory in Masdar City. This includes two superconducting qubit chips mounted in refrigerators at the laboratory, even though quantum systems can be created on a number of different platforms.

Here, the super conducting qubit chip is in a cooler that takes the system down to a temperature that goes down to around 10 millikelvin, which is even cooler than the temperature of outer space. You have to isolate the system from the thermal environment, but you also need to be able to insert cables to control and read the qubits. This is the most difficult challenge from an engineering and a technological perspective, especially when you scale up to a million qubits because quantum effects are so fragile. No one knows exactly the exact geometric configurations to minimise the thermal fluctuations and the noise, [and this is one of the things that testing will look into once we manufacture different iterations of quantum chip], Dr Aolita explained.

Qubit quality

The quality of the qubit is also very important, which boils down to the manufacture of a chip with superconducting current that displays quantum effects. The chips at TII are barely 2x10 millimetres in size, and at their centre is a tiny circuit known as the Josephson junction that enables the control of quantum elements.

It is also not just a matter of how many qubits you have, as the quality of the qubits matters. So, you need to have particles that preserve their quantum superposition, you need to be able to control them, have them interact the way you want, and read their state, but you also have to isolate them from the noise of the environment, he said.

Optimistic timeline

Despite these massive challenges to perfect a minute chip, Dr Aolita was also quite hopeful about the work being accomplished at TII, including discussions with industry about the possible applications of quantum computing.

I think we could see some useful quantum advantages in terms of classical computing power in three to five years, he said. [Right now], we have ideas, theories, preliminary experiments and even some prototypes. Quantum computers even exist, but they are small and not still able to outperform classical supercomputers. But this was the case with classical computing too. In the 1950s and 1940s, a computer was like an entire gym or vault. Then the transistor arrived, which revolutionised the field and miniaturised computers to much smaller regions of space that were also faster. Something similar could happen here and it really is a matter of finding which kind of qubit to use and this could ease the process a lot. My prediction for a timeline is optimistic, but not exaggerated, the researcher added.

Science research

Apart from the techonological breakthroughs, the QRCs efforts are likely to also improve Abu Dhabis status as a hub for science and research.

The UAE has a long tradition of adopting technologies and incorporating technologies bought from abroad. This is now [different in] that the government is putting a serious stake in creating and producing this technology and this creates a multiplicative effect in that young people get more enthusiastic about scientific careers. This creates more demand for universities to start new careers in physics, engineering, computer science, mathematics. This [will essentially have] a long-term, multiplicative effect on development, independent of the concrete goal or technical result of the project on the scientific environment in the country, Dr Aolita added.

The QRC team currently includes 45 people, but this will grow to 60 by the end of 2022, and perhaps to 80 people in 2023. We also want to prioritise hiring the top talent from across the world, Dr Aolita added.

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Researchers talk to each other next to the IBM Q System One quantum computer at IBM's research facility in Yorktown Heights, New York. Quantum computing's speed and efficacy represent one of the biggest threat to data security in the future.

Photo: Misha Friedman/Getty Images

Quantum computing (QC) represents the biggest threat to data security in the medium term, since it can make attacks against cryptography much more efficient. With quantum computing capabilities having advanced from the realm of academic exploration to tangible commercial opportunities, now is the time to take steps to secure everything from power grids and IoT infrastructures to the burgeoning cloud-based information-sharing platforms that we are all increasingly dependent upon.

Despite encrypted data appearing random, encryption algorithms follow logical rules and can be vulnerable to some kinds of attacks. All algorithms are inherently vulnerable to brute-force attacks, in which all possible combinations of the encryption key are tried.

According to Verizons 2021 Data Breach report, 85% of breaches caused by hacking involve brute force or the use of credentials that have been lost or stolen. Moreover, cybercrime costs the U.S. economy $100 billion a year and costs the global economy $450 billion annually.

Although traditionally, a 128-bit encryption key establishes a secure theoretical limit against brute-force attacks, this is a bare-minimum requirement for Advanced Encryption Standard symmetric keys, which are currently the default symmetric encryption cipher used for public and commercial purposes.

These are considered to be computationally infeasible to crack, and most experts consider todays 128-bit and 256-bit encryption keys to be generally secure. However, within the next 20 years, sufficiently large quantum computers will be able to break essentially all public-key schemes currently in use in a matter of seconds.

Quantum computing speeds up prime number factorization, so computers with quantum computation can easily break cryptographic keys via quickly calculating and exhaustively searching secret keys. A task thought to be computationally impossible by conventional computer architectures becomes easy by compromising existing cryptographic algorithms, shortening the span of time needed to break public-key cryptography from years to hours.

Quantum computers outperform conventional computers for specific problems by leveraging complex phenomena such as quantum entanglement and the probabilities associated with superpositions (when quantum bits [qubits] exist in several states at the same time) to perform a series of operations in such a way that favorable probabilities are enhanced. When a quantum algorithm is applied, the probability of measuring the correct answer is maximized.

Algorithms such as RSA, AES, and Blowfish remain worldwide standards in cybersecurity. The cryptographic keys of these algorithms are based mainly on two mathematical procedures the integer factorization problem and the discrete logarithm problem that make it difficult to crack the key, preserving the systems security.

Two algorithms for quantum computers challenge current cryptography systems. Shors algorithm greatly speeds up the time required for solving the integer factorization problem. Grovers quantum search algorithm, while not as fast, still significantly increases the speed of decryption keys that, with traditional computing technologies, would take time on the order of quintillions of years.

All widely used public-key cryptographic algorithms are theoretically vulnerable to attacks based on Shors algorithm, but the algorithm depends on operations that can only be achieved by a large-scale quantum computer (>7000 qubits). Quantum computers are thus likely to make encryption systems based on RSA and discrete logarithm assumptions (DSA, ECDSA) obsolete. Companies like D-Wave Systems promise to deliver a 7000+ qubit solution by 2023-2024.

Quantum technologies are expected to bring about disruption in multiple sectors. Cybersecurity will be one of the main industries to feel this disruption; and although there are already several players preparing for and developing novel approaches to cybersecurity in a post-quantum world, it is vital for corporations, governments, and cybersecurity supply-chain stakeholders to understand the impact of quantum adoption and learn about some of the key players working on overcoming the challenges that this adoption brings about.

Businesses can implement quantum-safe cybersecurity solutions that range from developing risk management plans to harnessing quantum mechanics itself to fight the threats QC poses.

Related Reading

The replacement of encryption algorithms generally requires steps including replacing cryptographic libraries, implementation of validation tools, deployment of hardware required by the algorithm, updating dependent operating systems and communications devices, and replacing security standards and protocols. Hence, post-quantum cryptography needs to be prepared for eventual threats as many years in advance as is practical, despite quantum algorithms not currently being available to cyberattackers.

Quantum computing has the potential for both disrupting and augmenting cybersecurity. There are techniques that leverage quantum physics to protect from quantum-computing related threats, and industries that adopt these technologies will find themselves significantly ahead of the curve as the gap between quantum-secure and quantum-vulnerable systems grows.

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