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Excitement about the era of Quantum Error Correction is reaching a fever pitch.

By Prof Michael J Biercuk, CEO and Founder, Q-CTRL

Excitement about the era of Quantum Error Correction (QEC) is reaching a fever pitch. This has been a topic under development for many years by academics and government agencies as QEC is a foundational concept in quantum computing.

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We’re still years away from seeing physical quantum computers break into the market with any scale and reliability, but don’t give up on deep tech just yet. The market for high-level quantum computer science — which applies quantum principles to manage complex computations in areas like finance and artificial intelligence — appears to be quickening its pace.

In the latest development, a startup out of San Sebastian, Spain, called Multiverse Computing has raised €25 million (or $27 million) in an equity funding round led by Columbus Venture Partners. The funding values the startup at €100 million ($108 million), and it will be used in two main areas. The startup plans to continue building out its existing business working with startups in verticals like manufacturing and finance, and it wants to forge new efforts to work more closely with AI companies building and operating large language models.

In both cases, the pitch is the same, said CEO Enrique Lizaso Olmos: “optimization.”

Researchers observe the quantum coherence of a quintet state with four electron spins in molecular systems for the first time at room temperature.

In a study published in Science Advances, a group of researchers led by Associate Professor Nobuhiro Yanai from Kyushu University’s Faculty of Engineering, in collaboration with Associate Professor Kiyoshi Miyata from Kyushu University and Professor Yasuhiro Kobori of Kobe University, reports that they have achieved quantum coherence at room temperature: the ability of a quantum system to maintain a well-defined state over time without getting affected by surrounding disturbances.

This breakthrough was made possible by embedding a chromophore, a dye molecule that absorbs light and emits color, in a metal-organic framework, or MOF, a nanoporous crystalline material composed of metal ions and organic ligands.

Wang, H., Xue, Y., Qu, Y. et al. Multidimensional Bose quantum error correction based on neural network decoder. npj Quantum Inf 8, 134 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41534-022-00650-z.

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A research team led by the Paul Scherrer Institute has spectroscopically observed the fractionalization of electronic charge in an iron-based metallic ferromagnet. Experimental observation of the phenomenon is not only of fundamental importance. Since it appears in an alloy of common metals at accessible temperatures, it holds potential for future exploitation in electronic devices. The discovery is published in the journal Nature.

Basic quantum mechanics tells us that the fundamental unit of charge is unbreakable: the electron charge is quantized. Yet, we have come to understand that exceptions exist. In some situations, electrons arrange themselves collectively as if they were split into independent entities, each possessing a fraction of the charge.

The fact that charge can be fractionalized is not new: it has been observed experimentally since the early 1980s with the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect. In this, the conductance of a system in which electrons are confined to a two-dimensional plane is observed to be quantized in fractional—rather than integer—units of charge.

A team of Stony Brook University physicists and their collaborators have taken a significant step toward the building of a quantum internet testbed by demonstrating a foundational quantum network measurement that employs room-temperature quantum memories. Their findings are described in a paper published in the Nature journal Quantum Information.

Research with quantum computing and quantum networks is taking place around the world in the hopes of developing a quantum internet, a network of quantum computers, sensors, and communication devices that will create, process, and transmit quantum states and entanglement. It is anticipated to enhance society’s internet system and provide certain services and securities that the current internet does not have.

The field of quantum information combines aspects of physics, mathematics, and classical computing to use quantum mechanics to solve complex problems much faster than classical computing and to transmit information in an unhackable manner. While the vision of a quantum internet system is growing and the field has seen a surge in interest from researchers and the public at large, accompanied by a steep increase in the capital invested, an actual quantum internet prototype has not been built.

Quantum computers, which can solve several complex problems exponentially faster than classical computers, are expected to improve artificial intelligence (AI) applications deployed in devices like autonomous vehicles; however, just like their predecessors, quantum computers are vulnerable to adversarial attacks.

A team of University of Texas at Dallas researchers and an industry collaborator have developed an approach to give quantum computers an extra layer of protection against such attacks. Their solution, Quantum Noise Injection for Adversarial Defense (QNAD), counteracts the impact of attacks designed to disrupt inference—AI’s ability to make decisions or solve tasks.

The team will present research that demonstrates the method at the IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust held May 6–9 in Washington, D.C.

Superconducting circuits, which conduct electricity without resistance, are among the most promising technologies for quantum computing and ultrafast logic circuits. However, finding a practical way to work with these materials that require extremely cold temperatures has been a challenge.

In a step toward that goal, a team of researchers led by Prof. Hong Tang developed and successfully demonstrated a device that presents a viable solution in transferring a very weak signal from a computing device stored at cryogenic temperatures to room temperature electronics to achieve a fast data transfer with very low energy consumption. The results are published in Nature Photonics.

The practical use of superconducting circuits requires connecting them to room temperature electronics. But doing so has largely relied on coaxial cables, which have a limited bandwidth and limited thermal conductivity – two factors that negate the benefits of superconducting circuits.

A research team from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and the University of Salerno in Italy has discovered that thin films of elemental bismuth exhibit the so-called non-linear Hall effect, which could be applied in technologies for the controlled use of terahertz high-frequency signals on electronic chips.

Bismuth combines several advantageous properties not found in other systems to date, as the team reports in Nature Electronics. In particular, the quantum effect is observed at room temperature. The thin-layer films can be applied even on plastic substrates and could therefore be suitable for modern high-frequency technology applications.

“When we apply a current to certain materials, they can generate a voltage perpendicular to it. We physicists call this phenomenon the Hall effect, which is actually a unifying term for effects with the same impact, but which differ in the underlying mechanisms at the electron level. Typically, the Hall voltage registered is linearly dependent on the applied current,” says Dr. Denys Makarov from the Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research at HZDR.