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Quantum computing has the promise to reshape industries by unleashing computing power well beyond what traditional computers have. Logistics, pharmaceuticals and financial services all stand to benefit from applying the new technology.

JPMorgan Chase (ticker: JPM) published data last week about one of its quantum-computing experiments demonstrating the banks growing expertise in that realm. The academic-style paper is a little Byzantine, but investors should pay attention, because they will be hearing more about quantum computing from other players, including Honeywell (HON), Microsoft (MSFT) and Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) in the near future.

In this paper, we present a novel, canonical way to produce a quantum oracle from an algebraic expression, the authors of the JPMorgan paper wrote. Thats a mouthful. Canonical, in this instance, appears to mean authoritative. And according to Microsoft, a quantum oracle is a is a black box operation that is used as input to another algorithm.

Microsofts definition only raises more questions and probably doesnt help many of the uninitiated, Barrons included. Classically, an oracle answers questions about the future. That isnt a bad analogy for quantum computing. The technology is mysterious and its power not completely understood by many peopleinvestors included.

The use of a quantum oracle, in this instance, makes doing complicated math with fibonacci numbers easier than with traditional computing systems. Fibonacci numbers form a sequence in which each number is the sum of the prior two. The sequences have applications in investing and information security, among other areas.

The Morgan team ran their experiment on the new Honeywell computer based on trapped-ion technology with quantum volume 64.

Honeywell has the hardware. And just before the JPMorgan paper was released, the industrial conglomerate announced it had created the worlds most powerful quantum computer, achieving a quantum volume of 64. Essentially, Honeywell has successfully tethered six q-bits, or quantum bits, together.

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Quantum volume is an industry term. The number 64 comes from 2 raised to the power of 6. A big reason quantum computers can do more is the q-bits can have two values at the same time. Six bits can have, essentially, 64 states at once. Quite frankly, its all a little confusing.

Today, quantum computers can still be beaten in most applications by traditional computers. But quantum power is growing. The first Wright brother flight went 600 meters, Christopher Savoie, founder and CEO of quantum computing firm Zapata Computing, said. He was explaining how to think of the current generation of quantum-computing technology. The Wright brothers flight happened in 1903 and by 1918 there were air forces around the globe.

Zapata partners with Honeywell to help develop quantum programs, applications and algorithms. Zapata helps with the software running on Honeywell hardware used by JPMorgan.

The capability of [quantum computing] is exponential, Savoie said. There is a hockey-stick-like pattern that develops as more q-bits are added to the system. It will be tough to find an area of human activity where this wont help.

It is a little mind bending. But paying attention early will give investors an edge down the road.

JPMorgan stock was down more than 2% last week, worse than the 1.9% and 1% respective gains of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 over the same span. Honeywell shares gained 0.6% last week.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com

Originally posted here:
JPMorgan Shows Its Chops in Quantum Computing. Heres Why It Matters. - Barron's

Honeywell says its new quantum computer is twice as fast than any other machine.

In the race to the future of quantum computing, Honeywell has just secured a fresh lead.

The North Carolina-based conglomerate announced Thursday that it has produced the worlds fastest quantum computer, at least twice as powerful as the existing computers operated by IBM and Google.

The machine, located in a 1,500-square-foot high-security storage facility in Boulder, Colorado, consists of a stainless steel chamber about the size of basketball that is cooled by liquid helium at a temperature just above absolute zero, the point at which atoms stop vibrating. Within that chamber, individual atoms floating above a computer chip are targeted with lasers to perform calculations.

While people have studied the potential of quantum computing for decades, that is, building machines with the ability to complete calculations beyond the limits of classic computers and supercomputers, the sector has until recently been limited to the intrigue of research groups at tech companies such as IBM and Google.

But in the past year, the race between those companies to claim supremacy and provide a commercial use in the quantum race has become heated. Honeywells machine has achieved a Quantum Volume of 64, a metric devised by IBM that measures the capability of the machine and error rates, but is also difficult to decipher (and as quantum computing expert Scott Aaronson wrote in March, is potentially possible to game). By comparison, IBM announced in January that it had achieved a Quantum Volume of 32 with its newest machine, Raleigh.

Google has also spent significant resources on developing its quantum capabilities and In October said it had developed a machine that completed a calculation that would have taken a supercomputer 10,000 years to process in just 200 seconds. (IBM disputed Googles claim, saying the calculation would have taken only 2.5 days to complete.)

Honeywell has been working toward this goal for the past decade when it began developing the technology to produce cryogenics and laser tools. In the past five years, the company assembled a team of more than 100 technologists entirely dedicated to building the machine, and in March, Honeywell announced it would be within three months a goal it was able to meet even as the Covid-19 turned its workforce upside down and forced some employees to work remotely. We had to completely redesign how we work in the facilities, had to limit who was coming on the site, and put in place physical barriers, says Tony Uttley, president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions. All of that happened at the same time we were planning on being on this race.

The advancement also means that Honeywell is opening its computer to companies looking to execute their own unimaginably large calculations a service that can cost about $10,000 an hour, says Uttley. While it wont disclose how many customers it has, Honeywell did say that it has a contract with JPMorgan Chase, which has its own quantum experts who will use its machine to execute gargantuan tasks, such as building fraud detection models. For those companies without in-house quantum experts, queries can be made through intermediary quantum firms, Zapata Computing and Cambridge Quantum Computing.

With greater access to the technology, Uttley says, quantum computers are nearing the point where they have graduated from an item of fascination to being used to solve problems like climate change and pharmaceutical development. Going forward, Uttley says Honeywell plans to increase the Quantum Volume of its machine by a factor of 10 every year for the next five years, reaching a figure of 640,000 a capability far beyond that imagined ever before.

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Honeywell Says It Has Built The Worlds Most Powerful Quantum Computer - Forbes

EMERGING TECH

Lockheed Martin Ventures -- the defense companys technology startup investment arm -- has backed two companies through separate avenues announced this week.

In a release Tuesday, quantum computing company IonQ said it grew its total fundraising amount to $84 million through a new Series B round that represents its second significant round of investments since the 2015 founding with $2 million in seed money.

The latest round included Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH and Cambium, another investment firm that focuses on companies pushing future computational paradigm changes.

For Lockheed Martin Ventures, this investment gains the company an early look at a technology of increasing interest to government agencies. Two years ago, the parent corporation doubled the size of the venture fund to $200 million and sharpened the focus on five core technology areas.

College Park, Maryland-based IonQ uses what it calls a trapped-ion method for its quantum computing platforms.

IonQ raised another $20 million in 2016 from Amazon Web Services, Googles venture arm and New Enterprise Associates to build two new quantum computers. Then in 2019 came an additional $55 million in a fundraising round that saw Samsung and Mubadala Capital enter the fray along with additional backing from AWS, GV and NEA.

Separately on Wednesday, training technology firm Red 6 announced it too has received an investment from Lockheed Martin Ventures.

Terms of the funding were undisclosed but Santa Monica, California-based Red 6 will use those funds to support the further development and commercialization of its Airborne Tactical Augmented Reality System offering used to help train airplane pilots.

ATARS more specifically is designed to support synthetic training environments that seek to evaluate human performance in a multi-echelon, mixed-reality environment.

Red 6 was founded in November 2017 and conducted a feasibility demonstration with the Air Force in February 2019, the same month that a $2.5 million seed funding round closed.

The company connected with the Air Force through AFWERX, a program designed to connect startups with the service branch. Red 6 is the first AFWERX-backed company to be awarded a Small Business Innovation Research Phase III contract.

Some of Red 6s previous investors include Moonshots Capital, Starburst Accelerator and Irongate Capital Partners.

About the Author

Ross Wilkers is a senior staff writer for Washington Technology. He can be reached at rwilkers@washingtontechnology.com. Follow him on Twitter: @rosswilkers. Also find and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Excerpt from:
Lockheed's ventures arm backs quantum computing and training tech firms - Washington Technology

Quantum teleportation is an important step in improving quantum computing.

Beam me up is one of the most famous catchphrases from the Star Trek series. It is the command issued when a character wishes to teleport from a remote location back to the Starship Enterprise.

While human teleportation exists only in science fiction, teleportation is possible in the subatomic world of quantum mechanicsalbeit not in the way typically depicted on TV. In the quantum world, teleportation involves the transportation of information, rather than the transportation of matter.

Last year scientists confirmed that information could be passed between photons on computer chips even when the photons were not physically linked.

Now, according to new research from the University of Rochester and Purdue University, teleportation may also be possible between electrons.

In a paper published in Nature Communications and one to appear in Physical Review X, the researchers, including John Nichol, an assistant professor of physics at Rochester, and Andrew Jordan, a professor of physics at Rochester, explore new ways of creating quantum-mechanical interactions between distant electrons. The research is an important step in improving quantum computing, which, in turn, has the potential to revolutionize technology, medicine, and science by providing faster and more efficient processors and sensors.

Quantum teleportation is a demonstration of what Albert Einstein famously called spooky action at a distancealso known as quantum entanglement. In entanglementone of the basic of concepts of quantum physicsthe properties of one particle affect the properties of another, even when the particles are separated by a large distance. Quantum teleportation involves two distant, entangled particles in which the state of a third particle instantly teleports its state to the two entangled particles.

Quantum teleportation is an important means for transmitting information in quantum computing. While a typical computer consists of billions of transistors, called bits, quantum computers encode information in quantum bits, or qubits. A bit has a single binary value, which can be either 0 or 1, but qubits can be both 0 and 1 at the same time. The ability for individual qubits to simultaneously occupy multiple states underlies the great potential power of quantum computers.

Scientists have recently demonstrated quantum teleportation by using electromagnetic photons to create remotely entangled pairs of qubits.

Qubits made from individual electrons, however, are also promising for transmitting information in semiconductors.

Individual electrons are promising qubits because they interact very easily with each other, and individual electron qubits in semiconductors are also scalable, Nichol says. Reliably creating long-distance interactions between electrons is essential for quantum computing.

Creating entangled pairs of electron qubits that span long distances, which is required for teleportation, has proved challenging, though: while photons naturally propagate over long distances, electrons usually are confined to one place.

In order to demonstrate quantum teleportation using electrons, the researchers harnessed a recently developed technique based on the principles of Heisenberg exchange coupling. An individual electron is like a bar magnet with a north pole and a south pole that can point either up or down. The direction of the polewhether the north pole is pointing up or down, for instanceis known as the electrons magnetic moment or quantum spin state. If certain kinds of particles have the same magnetic moment, they cannot be in the same place at the same time. That is, two electrons in the same quantum state cannot sit on top of each other. If they did, their states would swap back and forth in time.

The researchers used the technique to distribute entangled pairs of electrons and teleport their spin states.

We provide evidence for entanglement swapping, in which we create entanglement between two electrons even though the particles never interact, and quantum gate teleportation, a potentially useful technique for quantum computing using teleportation, Nichol says. Our work shows that this can be done even without photons.

The results pave the way for future research on quantum teleportation involving spin states of all matter, not just photons, and provide more evidence for the surprisingly useful capabilities of individual electrons in qubit semiconductors.

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Is teleportation possible? Yes, in the quantum world - University of Rochester

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced this week that it has named 76 scientists from across the country, including assistant professor of physics Chen Wang, to receive significant funding for research with its Early Career Award. It provides university-based researchers with at least $150,000 per year in research support for five years.

DOE Under Secretary for Science Paul Dabbar says DOE is proud to support funding that will sustain Americas scientific workforce and create opportunities for our researchers to remain competitive on the world stage. By bolstering our commitment to the scientific community, we invest into our nations next generation of innovators.

Wang says, I feel very honored to receive this award. This is a great opportunity to explore a new paradigm of reducing error for emerging quantum technologies.

His project involves enhancing quantum bit (qubit) performance using a counter-intuitive new approach. He will harness friction usually an unwelcome source of error in quantum devices to make qubits perform with fewer errors. The work is most relevant for quantum computing, he says, but potential applications include also cryptography, communications and simulations.

One of the basic differences between classical and quantum computing which is not in practical use yet is that classical computers perform calculations and store data using stable bits labeled as zero or one that never unintendently change. Accidental change would introduce error.

By contrast, in quantum computing, qubits can flip from zero to one or anywhere between. This is a source of their great promise to vastly expand quantum computers ability to perform calculations and store data, but it also introduces errors, Wang explains.

The world is intrinsically quantum, he says, so using a classical computer to make predictions at the quantum level about the properties of anything composed of more than a few dozens of atoms is limited. Quantum computing increases the ability to process information exponentially. With every extra qubit you add, the amount of information you can process doubles.

Think of the state of a bit or a qubit as a position on a sphere, he says. For a classical bit, a zero or one is stable, maybe the north or south pole. But a quantum bit can be anywhere on the surface or be continuously tuned between zero and one.

To address potential errors, Wang plans to explore a new method to reduce qubit errors by introducing autonomous error correction the qubit corrects itself. In quantum computing, correcting errors is substantially harder than in classical computing because you are literally forbidden from reading your bits or making backups, he says.

Quantum error correction is a beautiful, surprising and complicated possibility that makes a very exciting experimental challenge. Implementing the physics of quantum error correction is the most fascinating thing I can think of in quantum physics.

We are already familiar with how friction helps in stabilizing a classical, non-quantum system, he says, such as a swinging pendulum. The pendulum will eventually stop due to friction the resistance of air dissipates energy and the pendulum will not randomly go anywhere, Wang points out.

In much the same way, introducing friction between a qubit and its environment puts a stabilizing force on it. When it deviates, the environment will give it a kick back in place, he says. However, the kick has to be designed in very special ways. Wang will experiment using a super-cooled superconducting device made of a sapphire chip on which he will deposit a very thin patterned aluminum film.

He says, Its a very difficult challenge, because to have one qubit correct its errors, by some estimates you need tens to even thousands of other qubits to help it, and they need to be in communication. But it is worthwhile because with them, we can do things faster and we can do tasks that are impossible with classical computing now.

Read more:
Physicist Chen Wang Receives DOE Early Career Award - UMass News and Media Relations