IQM Finland Oy (IQM), a European startup which makes hardware for quantum computers, has raised a 15M equity investment round from the EIC Accelerator program for the development of quantum computers. This is in addition to a raise of 3.3M from the Business Finland government agency. This takes the companys funding to over 32M. The company previously raised a 11.4M seed round.

IQM has hired a lot of engineers in its short life, and now says it plans to hire one quantum engineer per week on the pathway to commercializing its technology through the collaborative design of quantum-computing hardware and applications.

Dr. Jan Goetz, CEO and co-founder of IQM said: Quantum computers will be funded by European governments, supporting IQM s expansion strategy to build quantum computers in Germany, in a statement.

The news comes as the Finnish government announced only last week that it would acquire a quantum computer with 20.7M for the Finnish State Research center VTT.

It has been a mind-blowing forty-million past week for quantum computers in Finland. IQM staff is excited to work together with VTT, Aalto University, and CSC in this ecosystem, rejoices Prof. Mikko Mttnen, Chief Scientist and co-founder of IQM.

Previously, the German government said it would put 2bn into commissioning at least two quantum computers.

IQM thus now plans to expand its operations in Germany via its team in Munich.

IQM will build co-design quantum computers for commercial applications and install testing facilities for quantum processors, said Prof. Enrique Solano, CEO of IQM Germany.

The company is focusing on superconducting quantum processors, which are streamlined for commercial applications in a Co-Design approach. This works by providing the full hardware stack for a quantum computer, integrating different technologies, and then invites collaborations with quantum software companies.

IQM was one of the 72 to succeed in the selection process of the EIC. Altogether 3969 companies applied for this funding.

Link:
European quantum computing startup takes its funding to 32M with fresh raise - TechCrunch

Prototype of portable, battery powered, biosensing device - a few centimetres in size.

Archer Materials has announced progressing work on its graphene-based biosensor technology.

The Australian company told shareholders on Thursday it has developed a new set of graphene materials that could be applied for enhanced biosensing and to aid in the development of biocompatible inks in water-based solvents.

Archer said doing so could eliminate the use of hazardous and non-biocompatible chemicals, increasing the scope of biomolecules that can be detected.

"There is no doubt that diseases have a devastating effect on economies and there is value in advancing disease diagnosis using simpler, more accurate biosensors," Archer CEO Dr Mohammad Choucair said. "However, there are only a limited number of materials that can perform [biosensing], and they require innovative development."

Archer said laboratory synthesis was complemented with computational chemistry to calculate and visualise the materials candidates at the atom-level for their suitability in biomolecular sensing.

"We have rapidly advanced from raw material feedstock to prototypes of a portable battery-powered sensing device that can incorporate biological material," Choucair said. "This early stage work has the potential to allow much simpler and more effective sensing where early diagnosis of life-threatening diseases can lead to much improved outcomes."

With Australia traditionally not so good at commercialising research and development, Archer touted its graphene-based biotechnology as at an early stage of commercialisation.

It said it has been working with commercial advisors within the Australian biotech industry to produce a roadmap.

Archer's commercial strategy involves applying the "triple-helix business model" for biotechnology innovation to develop printable graphene-based biosensor componentry and sublicense the associated intellectual property rights.

It's hoping to do this by developing commercial-grade prototypes; pursuing patent applications in Australia, the United States, and Europe; and establishingcommercial partnerships.

Last month, Archer announced its plan to raise up to AU$3 million, offering shares at AU$0.60 per share.

The funds raised will be used to increase the pace of Archer's current work programs and to start hiring additional staff to do this work, it said.

Also in May, Archer announced a new agreement with IBM which it hopes will advance quantum computing and progress work towards solutions for the greater adoption of the technology.

Joining theIBM Q Network, Archer will gain access to IBM's quantum computing expertise and resources, seeing the Sydney-based company use IBM's open-source software framework, Qiskit.

Archer to work alongside IBM in progressing quantum computing

First quantum-focused Australian member of the IBM Q Network.

Archer puts together a few-qubit array

The Australian company has taken the next step towards creating a room temperature quantum computer.

Australia's Archer details first stage of room temp quantum chip success

The company has announced assembly of the first qubit material component of its 12CQ room-temperature qubit processor, touting nanometre precision.

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Archer looks to commercialisation future with graphene-based biosensor tech - ZDNet

NASAs current mission, to boldly go where no PR campaign has on behalf of Elon Musks SpaceX, is a noble one. Donald Trump wants US boots on Mars. And considering the bipartisan popularity of the idea, whoever ends up president when the smoke clears in November will probably continue the effort.

But what if, instead of spending trillions hurtling mammals towards distant rocks just to prove its possible, we actually did something so technologically innovative it fundamentally changes how we approach science?

NASA should put a particle collider on the Moon.

Instead of waiting on Musk and Trump to solve space radiation (something well need to do before anyone gets close to Mars) humans could be perfecting quantum computers and inventing warp drives.

The most famous collider, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, sits at the pinnacle of human achievement. It takes tiny particles and accelerates them to nearly the speed of light and smashes them together so we can solve really big problems.

Colliders do have practical uses especially in the fields of chemistry and nuclear physics but, for the most part, theyre meant to help us understand the big picture. If we can determine the ground truth about how ions and protons function, the rest of our understanding of physics should begin to fall into place.

The problem is that we know so very little about how the quantum and classical universes are bridged and, for the most part, the biggest questions (how did the universe begin, whats up with black holes, and whats the real Hubble Constant?) remain unanswered. Putting a particle accelerator on the Moon could, theoretically, answer those questions and more.

Nikolai Zaitsev, a researcher Im not familiar with from Innovaest.Org, published a pre-print paper earlier this year on ArXiv titled Extraterrestrial artificial particle sources. Application toneutrino physics and cosmic rays studies. In this memo, as he calls it, Zaitsev postulates that putting a collider on the Moon would solve most of the problems with terrestrial units:

The Moon is considered as the most promising location for artificial particle sources outside the Earth. This natural satellite is surrounded with deep vacuum, is at low cryogenic temperatures and is always facing the Earth with one side. These features can be exploited by setting up lunar neutrino factory, which may create a possibility for more precise measurements of oscillations and possibly mass ofneutrinos.

The big idea here is that the Moon already comes with a vacuum that, as astrophysicistPaul Sutter writes in Live Science, is 10 times better than anything physicists have manufactured in their experiments. Couple that with the Moons extremely low temperatures and youve potentially got a collider that can do ten times the colliding with a fraction of the power requirements.

While there are no guarantees in experimental physics, the data generated by particle colliders has the potential to directly inform a greater theory of everything. And, perhaps most exciting, it could significantly increase our understanding of quantum computer systems. To put it in colloquial parlance: building bigger, better colliders might one day help us build quantum computers that actually work. We could theoretically use these quantum systems to solve problems such as warp drives, nuclear fusion, and object entanglement.

Its quite the leap to say that putting a collider on the Moon could suddenly rocket our civilization into an era of science-based peace and prosperity the likes of which has only existed on the Earth depicted in Star Trek. But its probably a damn good start.

H/t: Paul Sutter, Live Science

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Dear NASA, please put a particle collider on the Moon - The Next Web

The well-known cat-in-a-box theoretical experiment proposed by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrdinger is an instance of one of the basic properties of quantum mechanics, namely the unpredictable mechanism of particles at the quantum level.

This makes working with quantum mechanics extremely challenging, but now, a team of physicists believes that quantum predictions can actually be made. In a research carried out last year and published in the journal Nature, the team demonstrated their capacity to predict something known as quantum jump, and even reverse the process after it has begun.

They have been able to, therefore, save Schrdingers cat.

For those not familiar with Schrdingers cat experiment, heres a quick commentary. The physicist imagined the following scenario: theres a cat in a closed box. In the same box, theres also a source of radioactive decay, a Geiger counter, and a sealed flask of poison.

If the Geiger counter perceives the radioactive decay of a single atom, it breaks the flask of poison, which kills the cat. There is no way to look inside, so you have no way of telling whether the cat is alive or dead. It exists in a state of both until you open the box.

The moment you do so, it is either one state or the other, and cannot be both at the same time anymore. This imaginary experiment is a metaphor for what is called quantum superposition, in which a particle can exist in multiple energy states simultaneously until the point at which you observe it. Once observed, its abrupt and random transition between states is known as a quantum jump. It is this jump that physicists have been able to not only predict but also manipulate, intentionally changing the outcome.

Schrdingers Cat Theoretical Experiment Concept [Image: Wikipedia]The researchers, led by a team of physicists at Yale University, managed to do so employing artificial atoms known as qubits, which are also used as the usual units of information in a quantum computer. Each time you measure a qubit, it carries out a quantum jump. There are rather unpredictable in the long term, which can lead to issues in quantum computing.

We wanted to know if it would be possible to get an advance warning signal that a jump is about to occur imminently, said physicist Zlatko Minev of Yale University.

The team created an experiment to evasively observe a superconducting qubit, using three microwave generators to irradiate the qubit in a closed 3D chamber made of aluminum. The radiation shifts the qubit between states, while another beam of microwave radiation observes the box.

When the qubit is in an energetically ground state, the microwave generates photons. An abrupt lack of photons means that the qubit is at the edge of making a quantum jump into an excited state. The study demonstrated that it wasnt so much a jump as a transition, similar to a slide of a lever.

Therefore, another accurately timed beam of radiation can reverse the quantum jump after it has been spotted, switching the qubit back to its original ground state; or, to refer to the Schrdingers cats metaphor, prevent the cat from dying and bring it back to life, or the ground state.

Theres still a long-run unpredictability as the experts cannot, for instance, foresee exactly when a quantum jump s going to take place; it could occur in five minutes or five hours. However, once it has started, it always follows the same trajectory. Throughout 6.8 million jumps the team witnessed, the pattern was constant.

Quantum jumps of an atom are somewhat analogous to the eruption of a volcano, Minev said. They are completely unpredictable in the long term. Nonetheless, with the correct monitoring, we can, with certainty, detect an advance warning of an imminent disaster and act on it before it has occurred.

The paper detailing the experiment and findings has been published in Nature.

Known for her passion for writing, Paula contributes to both Science and Health niches here at Dual Dove.

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Physicists Found a Way to Save Schrdingers Cat - Dual Dove

Waste heat is all around you. On a small scale, if your phone or laptop feels warm, thats because some of the energy powering the device is being transformed into unwanted heat.

On a larger scale, electric grids, such as high power lines, lose over 5% of their energy in the process of transmission. In an electric power industry that generated more than US$400 billion in 2018, thats a tremendous amount of wasted money.

Globally, the computer systems of Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others require enormous amounts of energy to power massive cloud servers and data centers. Even more energy, to power water and air cooling systems, is required to offset the heat generated by these computers.

Where does this wasted heat come from? Electrons. These elementary particles of an atom move around and interact with other electrons and atoms. Because they have an electric charge, as they move through a material like metals, which can easily conduct electricity they scatter off other atoms and generate heat.

Superconductors are materials that address this problem by allowing energy to flow efficiently through them without generating unwanted heat. They have great potential and many cost-effective applications. They operate magnetically levitated trains, generate magnetic fields for MRI machines and recently have been used to build quantum computers, though a fully operating one does not yet exist.

But superconductors have an essential problem when it comes to other practical applications: They operate at ultra-low temperatures. There are no room-temperature superconductors. That room-temperature part is what scientists have been working on for more than a century. Billions of dollars have funded research to solve this problem. Scientists around the world, including me, are trying to understand the physics of superconductors and how they can be enhanced.

A superconductor is a material, such as a pure metal like aluminum or lead, that when cooled to ultra-low temperatures allows electricity to move through it with absolutely zero resistance. How a material becomes a superconductor at the microscopic level is not a simple question. It took the scientific community 45 years to understand and formulate a successful theory of superconductivity in 1956.

While physicists researched an understanding of the mechanisms of superconductivity, chemists mixed different elements, such as the rare metal niobium and tin, and tried recipes guided by other experiments to discover new and stronger superconductors. There was progress, but mostly incremental.

Simply put, superconductivity occurs when two electrons bind together at low temperatures. They form the building block of superconductors, the Cooper pair. Elementary physics and chemistry tell us that electrons repel each other. This holds true even for a potential superconductor like lead when it is above a certain temperature.

When the temperature falls to a certain point, though, the electrons become more amenable to pairing up. Instead of one electron opposing the other, a kind of glue emerges to hold them together.

Discovered in 1911, the first superconductor was mercury (Hg), the basic element of old-fashioned thermometers. In order for mercury to become a superconductor, it had to be cooled to ultra-low temperatures. Kamerlingh Onnes was the first scientist who figured out exactly how to do that by compressing and liquefying helium gas. During the process, once helium gas becomes a liquid, the temperature drops to -452 degrees Fahrenheit.

When Onnes was experimenting with mercury, he discovered that when it was placed inside a liquid helium container and cooled to very low temperatures, its electric resistance, the opposition of the electric current in the material, suddenly dropped to zero ohms, a unit of measurement that describes resistance. Not close to zero, but zero exactly. No resistance, no heat waste.

This meant that an electric current, once generated, would flow continuously with nothing to stop it, at least in the lab. Many superconducting materials were soon discovered, but practical applications were another matter.

These superconductors shared one problem they needed to be cooled down. The amount of energy needed to cool a material down to its superconducting state was too expensive for daily applications. By the early 1980s, the research on superconductors had nearly reached its conclusion.

In a dramatic turn of events, a new kind of superconductor material was discovered in 1987 at IBM in Zurich, Switzerland. Within months, superconductors operating at less extreme temperatures were being synthesized globally. The material was a kind of a ceramic.

These new ceramic superconductors were made of copper and oxygen mixed with other elements such as lanthanum, barium and bismuth. They contradicted everything physicists thought they knew about making superconductors. Researchers had been looking for very good conductors, yet these ceramics were nearly insulators, meaning that very little electrical current can flow through. Magnetism destroyed conventional superconductors, yet these were themselves magnets.

Scientists were seeking materials where electrons were free to move around, yet in these materials, the electrons were locked in and confined. The scientists at IBM, Alex Mller and Georg Bednorz, had actually discovered a new kind of superconductor. These were the high-temperature superconductors. And they played by their own rules.

Scientists now have a new challenge. Three decades after the high-temperature superconductors were discovered, we are still struggling to understand how they work at the microscopic level. Creative experiments are being conducted every day in universities and research labs around the world.

In my laboratory, we have built a microscope known as a scanning tunneling microscope that helps our research team see the electrons at the surface of the material. This allows us to understand how electrons bind and form superconductivity at an atomic scale.

We have come a long way in our research and now know that electrons also pair up in these high-temperature superconductors. There is great value and utility in answering how high-temperature superconductors work because that may be the route to room-temperature superconductivity. If we succeed in making a room-temperature superconductor, then we can address the billions of dollars that it costs in wasted heat to transmit energy from power plants to cities.

More remarkably, solar energy harvested in the vast empty deserts around the world could be stored and transmitted without any loss of energy, which could power cities and dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The potential is hard to imagine. Finding the glue for room-temperature superconductors is the next million-dollar question.

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Physicists hunt for room-temperature superconductors that could revolutionize the world's energy system - The Conversation US