Quantum computers could become more useful now researchers at Google have designed an algorithm that can translate complex physical problems into the language of quantum physics.
By Alex Wilkins
“Now, it is possible to teleport information so that it never physically travels across the connection — a “Star Trek” technology made real,” said researcher.
Scientists have been making discoveries in the quantum computing realm. In another leap, researchers successfully deployed the principles of quantum physics and transported information in the form of light patterns without physically moving the image itself.
According to a statement by the researchers, scientists demonstrated the quantum transport of the highest dimensionality of information to date. Particularly highlighting, the use of a teleportation-inspired configuration so that the information does not physically travel between the two communicating parties.
Continue reading “Quantum-inspired tech teleports data with light, like ‘Star Trek’” »
Much like the humans that created them, computers find physics hard, but quantum mechanics even harder. But a new technique created by three University of Chicago scientists allows computers to simulate certain challenging quantum mechanical effects in complex electronic materials with far less effort.
By making these simulations more accurate and efficient, the scientists hope the technique could help discover new molecules and materials, such as new types of solar cells or quantum computers.
“This advance holds immense potential for furthering our understanding of molecular phenomena, with significant implications for chemistry, material science, and related fields,” said scientist Daniel Gibney, a University of Chicago Ph.D. student in chemistry and first author on the paper, published Dec. 14 in Physical Review Letters.
At its Quantum Summit 2023, IBM took the stage with an interesting spirit: one of almost awe at having things go their way. But the quantum of today – the one that’s changing IBM’s roadmap so deeply on the back of breakthroughs upon breakthroughs – was hard enough to consolidate. As IBM sees it, the future of quantum computing will hardly be more permissive, and further improvements to the cutting-edge devices it announced at the event, the 133-qubit Heron Quantum Processing Unit (QPU), which is the company’s first utility-scale quantum processor, and the self-contained Quantum System Two, a quantum-specific supercomputing architecture, are ultimately required.
But each breakthrough that afterward becomes obsolete is another accelerational bump against what we might call quantum’s “plateau of understanding.” We’ve already been through this plateau with semiconductors, so much so that our latest CPUs and GPUs are reaching practical, fundamental design limits where quantum effects start ruining our math. Conquering the plateau means that utility and understanding are now enough for research and development to be somewhat self-sustainable – at least for a Moore’s-law-esque while.
Juan Bernabé-Moreno is IBM’s director of research for Ireland and the United Kingdom. The Spanish computer scientist is also responsible for IBM’s climate and sustainability strategy, which is being developed by seven global laboratories using artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing. He believes quantum computing is better suited to understanding nature and matter than classical or traditional computers.
Question. Is artificial intelligence a threat to humanity?
Answer. Artificial intelligence can be used to cause harm, but it’s crucial to distinguish between intentional and malicious use of AI, and unintended behavior due to lack of data control or governance rigor.
Kaiserslautern physicists in the team of Professor Dr. Herwig Ott have succeeded for the first time in directly observing pure trilobite Rydberg molecules. Particularly interesting is that these molecules have a very peculiar shape, which is reminiscent of trilobite fossils. They also have the largest electric dipole moments of any molecule known so far.
The researchers used a dedicated apparatus that is capable of preparing these fragile molecules at ultralow temperatures. The results reveal their chemical binding mechanisms, which are distinct from all other chemical bonds. The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.
For their experiment, the physicists used a cloud of rubidium atoms that was cooled down in an ultra-high vacuum to about 100 microkelvin—0.0001 degrees above absolute zero. Subsequently, they excited some of these atoms into a so-called Rydberg state using lasers. “In this process, the outermost electron in each case is brought into far-away orbits around the atomic body,” explains Professor Herwig Ott, who researches ultracold quantum gases and quantum atom optics at University of Kaiserslautern-Landau.
Nature Communications published research by an international team from Wits and ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences, which demonstrates the teleportation-like transport of “patterns” of light—this is the first approach that can transport images across a network without physically sending the image and a crucial step towards realizing a quantum network for high-dimensional entangled states.
Quantum communication over long distances is integral to information security and has been demonstrated with two-dimensional states (qubits) over very long distances between satellites. This may seem enough if we compare it with its classical counterpart, i.e., sending bits that can be encoded in 1s (signal) and 0s (no signal), one at a time.
However, quantum optics allow us to increase the alphabet and to securely describe more complex systems in a single shot, such as a unique fingerprint or a face.
IBM introduces introducing two new metrics — error per layered gate (EPLG) and CLOPSh — to fully encapsulate the performance of 100+ qubit processors powering this utility-scale era.
Layer fidelity provides a benchmark that encapsulates the entire processor’s ability to run circuits while revealing information about individual qubits, gates, and crosstalk. It expands on a well-established way to benchmark quantum computers, called randomized benchmarking. With randomized benchmarking, we add a set of randomized Clifford group gates (that’s the basic set of gates we use: X, Y, Z, H, SX, CNOT, ECR, CZ, etc.) to the circuit, then run an operation that we know, mathematically, should represent the inverse of the sequence of operations that precede it.
If any of the qubits do not return to their original state by the inverse operation upon measurement, then we know there was an error. We extract a number from this experiment by repeating it multiple times with more and more random gates, plotting on a graph how the errors increase with more gates, fitting an exponential decay to the plot, and using that line to calculate a number between 0 and 1, called the fidelity.
Continue reading “Updating how we measure quantum quality and speed” »
Companies and countries are in a race to develop quantum computers. The machines could revolutionize problem solving in medicine, physics, chemistry and engineering.
Causality is key to our experience of reality: dropping a glass, for example, causes it to smash, so it can’t smash before it’s dropped. But in the quantum world those rules don’t necessarily apply, and scientists have now demonstrated how that weirdness can be harnessed to charge a quantum battery.
In a sense, you could say that quantum batteries are powered by paradoxes. On paper, they work by storing energy in the quantum states of atoms and molecules – but of course, as soon as the word “quantum” enters the conversation you know weird stuff is about to happen. In this case, a new study has found that quantum batteries could work by violating cause-and-effect as we know it.
“Current batteries for low-power devices, such as smartphones or sensors, typically use chemicals such as lithium to store charge, whereas a quantum battery uses microscopic particles like arrays of atoms,” said Yuanbo Chen, an author of the study. “While chemical batteries are governed by classical laws of physics, microscopic particles are quantum in nature, so we have a chance to explore ways of using them that bend or even break our intuitive notions of what takes place at small scales. I’m particularly interested in the way quantum particles can work to violate one of our most fundamental experiences, that of time.”
