Category Archives: Quantum Computer
Quantum computers compete for supremacy – Salon
Scientists have long dreamed of developing quantum computers, machines that rely on arcane laws of physics to perform tasks far beyond the capability of todays strongest supercomputers. In theory such a machine could create mathematical models too complex for standard computers, vastly extending the range and accuracy of weather forecasts and financial market predictions, among other things. They could simulate physical processes such as photosynthesis, opening new frontiers in green energy. Quantum computing could also jolt artificial intelligence to a vastly higher level of sophistication: If IBMs Watson can already win at Jeopardy! and make some medical diagnoses, imagine what an enormously smarter version could do.
But to realize those visions, scientists first have to figure out how to actually build a quantum computer that can perform more than the simplest operations. They are now getting closer than ever, with IBM in May announcing its most complex quantum system so far and Google saying it is on track this year to unveil a processor with so-called quantum supremacy capabilities no conventional computer can match.
Small systems exist, but the next steps in the race to make them bigger will have to determine whether quantum computers can deliver on their potential. Scientists and industry players have focused largely on one of two approaches. One cools loops of wire to near 273.15 degrees Celsius, or absolute zero, turning them into superconductors where current flows with virtually no resistance. The other relies on trapped ionscharged atoms of the rare earth element ytterbium held in place in a vacuum chamber by laser beams and manipulated by other lasers. The oscillating charges (in both the wires and the trapped ions) function as quantum bits, or qubits, which can be harnessed to carry out the computers operations.
Quantum leaps
The trick to either approach is figuring out how to get from already demonstrated systemscontaining just a few qubits to ones that can handle the hundreds or thousands required for the kind of heavy lifting that quantum technology seems to promise. Last year IBM made a five-qubit quantum processor available to developers, researchers and programmers for experimentation via its cloud portal. The company has made significant progress since then, revealing in May that it has upgraded its cloud-based quantum computer to a 16-qubit processorand created a more tightly engineered 17-qubit processor that could be the basis for commercial systems. Both are based on the wire-loop superconducting circuits, as is Googles 20-qubit processor, which the company announced at a conference in Munich, Germany, on June 22. Alan Ho, an engineer in Googles Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, told the conference his company expects to achieve quantum supremacy with a 49-qubit chip by the end of this year.
Those numbers may not seem impressive. But a qubit is much more powerful than the kind of bit that serves as the smallest unit of data in a conventional computer. Those bits are based on the flow of electrical current, and make up the digital language in which all computing functions: Off means 0 and on means 1, and those two states encode all of the computers operations. Qubits, however, are not based on yes/no electrical switchesbut rather on a particles quantum properties, such as the direction in which an electron spins. And in the quantum world a particle can simultaneously exist in a variety of states more complex than simply on/off a phenomenon known as superposition. You can have heads, you can have tails, but you can also have any weighted superposition. You can have 70-30 heads-tails, says Christopher Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, and founder of IonQ, a start-up working on building a quantum computer with trapped ions.
The more-than-binary ability to occupy multiple states at once allows qubits to perform many calculations simultaneously, vastly magnifying their computing power. That power grows exponentially with the number of qubits. So at somewhere around 49 or 50 qubits, quantum computers reach the equivalent of about 10 quadrillion bits and become capable of calculations no classical computer could ever match, says John Preskill, a theoretical physicist at California Institute of Technology. Whether they will be doing useful things is a different question, he says.
Both superconducting circuits and trapped ions have a good shot at hitting that fiftyish-qubit threshold, says Jerry Chow, manager of experimental quantum computing at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Conventional thinking would suggest that more qubits means more power but Chow notes its not just about the number of qubits. He is more focused on the number and quality of calculations the machine can perform, a metric he calls quantum volume. That includes additional factors such as how fast the qubits can perform the calculations and how well they avoid or correct for errors that can creep in. Some of those factors can work against one another; adding more qubits, for instance, can increase the rate of errors as information passes down the line from one qubit to another. As a community we should all be focusingno matter whether were working on superconducting qubits or trapped ions or whatever on pushing this quantum volume higher and higher so we can really make more and more powerful quantum processors and do things that we never thought of, Chow says.
Better, not bigger
Monroe recently compared his five-qubit trapped ion system with IBMs five-qubit processor by running the same simple algorithms on both, and found the performance comparable. The biggest difference, he says, is that the trapped ions are all connected to one another via electromagnetic forces: Wiggle one ion in a string of 30 and every other ion reacts, making it easy to quickly and accurately pass information among them. In the wire-loop superconductor circuit only some qubits are connected, which makes passing information a slower process that can introduce errors.
One advantage of superconducting circuits is that they are easy to build using the same processes that make computer chips. They perform a computers basic logic gate operations that is, adding, subtracting or otherwise manipulating the bits in billionths of a second. On the other hand, qubits in this type of system hold their quantum state for only milliseconds thousandths of a second so any operation must be completed in that time.
Trapped ions, by contrast, retain their quantum states for many seconds sometimes even minutes or hours. But the logic gates in such a system run about 1,000 times slower than in superconductor-based quantum computing. That speed reduction probably does not matter in simple operations with just a few qubits, Monroe says. But it could become a problem for getting an answer in a reasonable amount of time as the number of qubits increases. For superconducting qubits, rising numbers may mean a struggle to connect them together.
And increasing the number of qubits, no matter what technology they are used with, makes it harder to connect and manipulate them because that must be done while keeping them isolated from the rest of the world so they will maintain their quantum states. The more atoms or electrons are grouped together in large numbers, the more the rules of classical physics take over and the less significant the quantum properties of the individual atoms become to how the whole system behaves. When you make a quantum system big, it becomes less quantum, Monroe says.
Chow thinks quantum computers will become powerful enough to do at least something beyond the capability of classical computers possibly a simulation in quantum chemistry within about five years. Monroe says it is reasonable to expect systems containing a few thousand qubits in a decade or so. To some extent, Monroe says, researchers will not know what they will be able to do with such systems until they figure out how to build them.
Preskill, who is 64, says he thinks he will live long enough to see quantum computers have an impact on society in the way the internet and smartphones have although he cannot predict exactly what that impact will be. These quantum systems kind of speak a language that digital systems dont speak, he says. We know from history that we just dont have the imagination to anticipate where new information technologies can carry us.
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Quantum computers compete for supremacy - Salon
Quantum Computers Compete for "Supremacy" – Scientific American
Scientists have long dreamed of developing quantum computers, machines that rely on arcane laws of physics to perform tasks far beyond the capability of todays strongest supercomputers. In theory such a machine could create mathematical models too complex for standard computers, vastly extending the range and accuracy of weather forecasts and financial market predictions, among other things. They could simulate physical processes such as photosynthesis, opening new frontiers in green energy. Quantum computing could also jolt artificial intelligence to a vastly higher level of sophistication: If IBMs Watson can already win at Jeopardy! and make some medical diagnoses, imagine what an enormously smarter version could do.
But to realize those visions, scientists first have to figure out how to actually build a quantum computer that can perform more than the simplest operations. They are now getting closer than ever, with IBM in May announcing its most complex quantum system so far and Google saying it is on track this year to unveil a processor with so-called quantum supremacycapabilities no conventional computer can match.
Small systems exist, but the next steps in the race to make them bigger will have to determine whether quantum computers can deliver on their potential. Scientists and industry players have focused largely on one of two approaches. One cools loops of wire to near 273.15 degrees Celsius, or absolute zero, turning them into superconductors where current flows with virtually no resistance. The other relies on trapped ionscharged atoms of the rare earth element ytterbium held in place in a vacuum chamber by laser beams and manipulated by other lasers. The oscillating charges (in both the wires and the trapped ions) function as quantum bits, or qubits, which can be harnessed to carry out the computers operations.
The trick to either approach is figuring out how to get from already demonstrated systemscontaining just a few qubitsto ones that can handle the hundreds or thousands required for the kind of heavy lifting that quantum technology seems to promise. Last year IBM made a five-qubit quantum processor available to developers, researchers and programmers for experimentation via its cloud portal. The company has made significant progress since then, revealing in May that it has upgraded its cloud-based quantum computer to a 16-qubit processorand created a more tightly engineered 17-qubit processor that could be the basis for commercial systems. Both are based on the wire-loop superconducting circuits, as is Googles 20-qubit processor, which the company announced at a conference in Munich, Germany, on June 22. Alan Ho, an engineer in Googles Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, told the conference his company expects to achieve quantum supremacy with a 49-qubit chip by the end of this year.
Those numbers may not seem impressive. But a qubit is much more powerful than the kind of bit that serves as the smallest unit of data in a conventional computer. Those bits are based on the flow of electrical current, and make up the digital language in which all computing functions: Off means 0 and on means 1, and those two states encode all of the computers operations. Qubits, however, are not based on yes/no electrical switchesbut rather on a particles quantum properties, such as the direction in which an electron spins. And in the quantum world a particle can simultaneously exist in a variety of states more complex than simply on/offa phenomenon known as superposition. You can have heads, you can have tails, but you can also have any weighted superposition. You can have 70-30 heads-tails, says Christopher Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, and founder of IonQ, a start-up working on building a quantum computer with trapped ions.
The more-than-binary ability to occupy multiple states at once allows qubits to perform many calculations simultaneously, vastly magnifying their computing power. That power grows exponentially with the number of qubits. So at somewhere around 49 or 50 qubits, quantum computers reach the equivalent of about 10 quadrillion bits and become capable of calculations no classical computer could ever match, says John Preskill, a theoretical physicist at California Institute of Technology. Whether they will be doing useful things is a different question, he says.
Both superconducting circuits and trapped ions have a good shot at hitting that fiftyish-qubit threshold, says Jerry Chow, manager of experimental quantum computing at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Conventional thinking would suggest that more qubits means more powerbut Chow notes its not just about the number of qubits. He is more focused on the number and quality of calculations the machine can perform, a metric he calls quantum volume. That includes additional factors such as how fast the qubits can perform the calculations and how well they avoid or correct for errors that can creep in. Some of those factors can work against one another; adding more qubits, for instance, can increase the rate of errors as information passes down the line from one qubit to another. As a community we should all be focusingno matter whether were working on superconducting qubits or trapped ions or whateveron pushing this quantum volume higher and higher so we can really make more and more powerful quantum processors and do things that we never thought of, Chow says.
Monroe recently compared his five-qubit trapped ion system with IBMs five-qubit processor by running the same simple algorithms on both, and found the performance comparable. The biggest difference, he says, is that the trapped ions are all connected to one another via electromagnetic forces: Wiggle one ion in a string of 30 and every other ion reacts, making it easy to quickly and accurately pass information among them. In the wire-loop superconductor circuit only some qubits are connected, which makes passing information a slower process that can introduce errors.
One advantage of superconducting circuits is that they are easy to build using the same processes that make computer chips. They perform a computers basic logic gate operationsthat is, adding, subtracting or otherwise manipulating the bitsin billionths of a second. On the other hand, qubits in this type of system hold their quantum state for only millisecondsthousandths of a secondso any operation must be completed in that time.
Trapped ions, by contrast, retain their quantum states for many secondssometimes even minutes or hours. But the logic gates in such a system run about 1,000 times slower than in superconductor-based quantum computing. That speed reduction probably does not matter in simple operations with just a few qubits, Monroe says. But it could become a problem for getting an answer in a reasonable amount of time as the number of qubits increases. For superconducting qubits, rising numbers may mean a struggle to connect them together.
And increasing the number of qubits, no matter what technology they are used with, makes it harder to connect and manipulate thembecause that must be done while keeping them isolated from the rest of the world so they will maintain their quantum states. The more atoms or electrons are grouped together in large numbers, the more the rules of classical physics take overand the less significant the quantum properties of the individual atoms become to how the whole system behaves. When you make a quantum system big, it becomes less quantum, Monroe says.
Chow thinks quantum computers will become powerful enough to do at least something beyond the capability of classical computerspossibly a simulation in quantum chemistrywithin about five years. Monroe says it is reasonable to expect systems containing a few thousand qubits in a decade or so. To some extent, Monroe says, researchers will not know what they will be able to do with such systems until they figure out how to build them.
Preskill, who is 64, says he thinks he will live long enough to see quantum computers have an impact on society in the way the internet and smartphones havealthough he cannot predict exactly what that impact will be. These quantum systems kind of speak a language that digital systems dont speak, he says. We know from history that we just dont have the imagination to anticipate where new information technologies can carry us.
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Quantum Computers Compete for "Supremacy" - Scientific American
Less is more for Canadian quantum computing researchers – ITworld
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Researchers in Canada have found a way make a key building block for quantum computing from a custom photonics chip and off-the-shelf components intended for use in telecommunications equipment.
They have built a chip that can create entangled pairs of multicolored photons. The result is that they can be manipulated as two "qudits," quantum computing digits, that can each hold 10 possible values.
Where classical computers operate on values in sequence, quantum computers are able to express all possible values of a variable simultaneously, collapsing to the "right" answer at the end of the calculation. Not all computing problems benefit from this treatment, but it is particularly useful in the factorization of large numbers, necessary for cracking many forms of encryption.
The storage elements quantum computers are made from are inherently unstable, and must be linked in a process known as entanglement in order to work together. The more of them there are, the harder it is to keep them all entangled and functioning for long enough to perform a calculation.
The simplest quantum element is the two-dimensional qubit, a quantum bit, which can simultaneously hold two values (0 and 1). With six qubits, a quantum computer could hold any or all of 64 (2 to the power 6) possible values.
But that requires maintaining the quantum state of six elements.
In July 2016, Russian scientists suggested that, instead of building quantum computers with qubits, it would be easier to maintaina smaller number of qudits, each able to hold a greater range of values. They showed how to make a five-dimensional qudit, which would have greater computing power than a quantum computer with two qubits.
Now the Canadian researchers have demonstrated that their photonic chip can entangle two 10-dimensional qudits, storing a greater range of values than a six-qubit quantum computer, but requiring the stabilization of only two elements.
Using the same chip, they say, it should be possible to generate two entangled qudits able to hold 9,000 or more values -- the equivalent of a 12-qubit computer.
By way of comparison, IBM hitched up a 16-qubit computer to its computing cloud back in May, inviting scientists to share time on it to test quantum computing algorithims.
Google, meanwhile, hopes to have an operational 49-qubit quantum computer by the end of the year.
It's not enough merely to generate these qudits: To turn them into a quantum computer it must also be possible to manipulate them.
That can be accomplished using standard telecommunications components such as modulators and filters, according to the researchers, making the system relatively accessible.
Being able to generate multidimensional quantum computing systems in this way will open the door to faster and more robust quantum communication protocols, and more efficient and error-tolerant quantum computation, the researchers said in a paper detailing their research in the journal Nature in June.
Peter Sayer covers European public policy, artificial intelligence, the blockchain, and other technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
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Less is more for Canadian quantum computing researchers - ITworld
New method could enable more stable and scalable quantum … – Phys.Org
June 29, 2017 by Ali Sundermier A false color image of one of the researchers' samples. Credit: University of Pennsylvania
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College, have discovered a new topological material which may enable fault-tolerant quantum computing. It is a form of computing that taps into the power of atoms and subatomic phenomena to perform calculations significantly faster than current computers and could potentially lead to advances in drug development and other complex systems.
The research, published in ACS Nano, was led by Jerome Mlack, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics & Astronomy in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences, and his mentors Nina Markovic, now an associate professor at Goucher, and Marija Drndic, Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics at Penn. Penn grad students Gopinath Danda and Sarah Friedensen, who received an NSF fellowship for this work, and Johns Hopkins Associate Research Professor Natalia Drichko and postdoc Atikur Rahman, now an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, also contributed to the study.
The research began while Mlack was a Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins. He and other researchers were working on growing and making devices out of topological insulators, a type of material that doesn't conduct current through the bulk of the material but can carry current along its surface.
As the researchers were working with these materials, one of their devices blew up, similar to what would happen with a short circuit.
"It kind of melted a little bit," Mlack said, "and what we found is that, if we measured the resistance of this melted region of one of these devices, it became superconducting. Then, when we went back and looked at what happened to the material and tried to find out what elements were in there, we only saw bismuth selenide and palladium."
When superconducting materials are cooled, they can carry a current with zero electrical resistance without losing any energy.
Topological insulators with superconducting properties have been predicted to have great potential for creating a fault-tolerant quantum computer. However, it is difficult to make good electrical contact between the topological insulator and superconductor and to scale such devices for manufacture, using current techniques. If this new material could be recreated, it could potentially overcome both of these difficulties.
In standard computing, the smallest unit of data that makes up the computer and stores information, the binary digit, or bit, can have a value of either 0, for off, or 1, for on. Quantum computing takes advantage of a phenomenon called superposition, which means that the bits, in this case called qubits, can be 0 and 1 at the same time.
A famous way of illustrating this phenomenon is a thought experiment called Schrodinger's cat. In this thought experiment, there is a cat in a box, but one doesn't know if the cat is dead or alive until the box is opened. Before the box is opened, the cat can be considered both alive and dead, existing in two states at once, but, immediately upon opening the box, the cat's state, or in the case of qubits, the system's configuration, collapses into one: the cat is either alive or dead and the qubit is either 0 or 1.
"The idea is to encode information using these quantum states," Markovic said, "but in order to use it in needs to be encoded and exist long enough for you to read."
One of the major problems in the field of quantum computing is that the qubits are not very stable and it's very easy to destroy the quantum states. These topological materials provide a way of making these states live long enough for to read them off and do something with them, Markovic said.
"It's kind of like if the box in Schrodinger's cat were on the top of a flag pole and the slightest wind could just knock it off," Mlack said. "The idea is that these topological materials at least widen the diameter of the flag pole so the box is sitting on more a column than a flag pole. You can knock it off eventually, but it's otherwise very hard to break the box and find out what happened to the cat."
Although their initial discovery of this material was an accident, they were able to come up with a process to recreate it in a controlled way.
Markovic, who was Mlack's advisor at Johns Hopkins at the time, suggested that, in order to recreate it without having to continually blow up devices, they could thermally anneal it, a process in which they put it into a furnace and heat it to a certain temperature.
Using this method, the researchers wrote, "the metal directly enters the nanostructure, providing good electrical contact and can be easily patterned into the nanostructure using standard lithography, allowing for easy scalability of custom superconducting circuits in a topological insulator."
Although researchers already have the capability of making a superconducting topological material, there's a huge problem in the fact that, when they put two materials together, there's a crack in between, which decreases the electrical contact. This ruins the measurements that they can make as well as the physical phenomena that could lead to making devices that will allow for quantum computing.
By patterning it directly into the crystal, the superconductor is embedded, and there are none of these contact problems. The resistance is very low, and they can pattern devices for quantum computing in one single crystal.
To test the material's superconducting properties, they put it in two extremely cold refrigerators, one of which cools down to nearly absolute zero. They also swept a magnetic field across it, which would kill the superconductivity and the topological nature of the material, to find out the limitations of the material. They also did standard electrical measurements, running a current through and looking at the voltage that is created.
"I think what is also nice in this paper is the combination of the electrical transport performance and the direct insights from the actual device materials characterization," Drndic said. "We have good insights on the composition of these devices to support all these claims because we did elemental analysis to understand how these two materials join."
One of the benefits of the researchers' device is that it's potentially scalable, capable of fitting onto a chip similar to the ones currently in our computers.
"Right now the main advances in quantum computing involve very complicated lithography methods," Drndic said. "People are doing it with nanowires which are connected to these circuits. If you have single nanowires that are very, very tiny and then you have to put them in particular places, it's very difficult. Most of the people who are on the forefront of this research have multimillion-dollar facilities and lots of people behind them. But this, in principle, we can do in one lab. It allows for making these devices in a simple way. You can just go and write your device any way you want it to be."
According to Mlack, though there is still a fair amount of limitation on it; there's an entire field that has sprouted up devoted to coming up with new and interesting ways to try to leverage these quantum states and quantum information. If successful, quantum computing will allow for a number of things.
"It will allow for much faster decryption and encryption of information," he said, "which is why some of the big defense contractors in the NSA, as well as companies like Microsoft, are interested in it. It will also allow us to model quantum systems in a reasonable amount of time and is capable of doing certain calculations and simulations faster than one would typically be able to do."
It's particularly good for completely different kinds of problems, such as problems that require massive parallel computations, Markovic said. If you need to do lots of things at once, quantum computing speeds things up tremendously.
"There are problems right now that would take the age of the universe to compute," she said.
"With quantum computing, you'd be able to do it in minutes." This could potentially also lead to advances in drug development and other complex systems, as well as enable new technologies.
The researchers hope to start building some more advanced devices that are geared towards actually building a qubit out of the systems that they have, as well as trying out different metals to see if they can change the properties of the material.
"It really is a new potential way of fabricating these devices that no one has done before," Mlack said. "In general, when people make some of these materials by combining this topological material and superconductivity, it is a bulk crystal, so you don't really control where everything is. Here we can actually customize the pattern that we're making into the material itself. That's the most exciting part, especially when we start talking about adding in different types of metals that give it different characteristics, whether those be ferromagnetic materials or elements that might make it more insulating. We still have to see if it works, but there's a potential for creating these interesting customized circuits directly into the material."
Explore further: Group works toward devising topological superconductor
More information: Jerome T. Mlack et al, Patterning Superconductivity in a Topological Insulator, ACS Nano (2017). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.7b01549
The experimental realization of ultrathin graphene - which earned two scientists from Cambridge the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 - has ushered in a new age in materials research.
The 'quantized magneto-electric effect' has been demonstrated for the first time in topological insulators at TU Wien, which is set to open up new and highly accurate methods of measurement.
University of Pennsylvania researchers are now among the first to produce a single, three-atom-thick layer of a unique two-dimensional material called tungsten ditelluride. Their findings have been published in 2-D Materials.
The global race towards a functioning quantum computer is on. With future quantum computers, we will be able to solve previously impossible problems and develop, for example, complex medicines, fertilizers, or artificial ...
Researchers have shown how to create a rechargeable "spin battery" made out of materials called topological insulators, a step toward building new spintronic devices and quantum computers.
In an article published today in the journal Nature, physicists report the first ever observation of heat conductance in a material containing anyons, quantum quasiparticles that exist in two-dimensional systems.
Scientists at The Australian National University (ANU) have designed a new nano material that can reflect or transmit light on demand with temperature control, opening the door to technology that protects astronauts in space ...
A new technique allows researchers to characterize nuclear material that was in a location even after the nuclear material has been removed a finding that has significant implications for nuclear nonproliferation and ...
Researchers at the University of Melbourne have demonstrated a way to detect nuclear spins in molecules non-invasively, providing a new tool for biotechnology and materials science.
Using a state-of-the-art device for measuring mass, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have made their most precise determination yet of Planck's constant, an important value in science ...
Scientists from India and Portugal recreated solar turbulence on a tabletop using a high intensity ultrashort laser pulse to excite a hot, dense plasma and followed the evolution of the giant magnetic field generated by the ...
By measuring the random jiggling motion of electrons in a resistor, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have contributed to accurate new measurements of the Boltzmann constant, a fundamental ...
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New method could enable more stable and scalable quantum ... - Phys.Org
Volkswagen buys D-Wave quantum computers which sell for $15 million each – Robotics and Automation News (press release) (registration)
D-Waves quantum computing system
Volkswagen has become a customer of D-Wave Systems, which builds quantum computers that cost $15 million each.
Martin Hofmann, VWs chief information officer, told New York Times that the investment in quantum computing technology is a sign of things to come.For us, its a new era of technology, he said.
VW is claimed to have used a D-Wave computer to steer the movements of 10,000 taxis in Beijing simultaneously, optimising their routes and reducing congestion, according to the report in NYT.
While some expressed scepticism over the test, many computer technology experts agree that binary computing systems will not be capable of keeping up with the colossal growth in both the volume of data and the requirements for processing it.
Quantum computing, which some say might be the solution, is still in the experimental stage and there are many challenges to overcome, never mind the fact that no one understands anything about it.
Quantum craziness
Quantum computers, as the name suggests, is supposed to utilise the strange occurrences of the quantum world, which are very different from the binary computing world.
In binary systems, which is what all current computers use, the transistors on a microchip are either on or off 0 or 1. Either of these states is a bit, or a binary digit, in computing jargon, and is the smallest unit of data.
Combinations of these zeros and ones are called bytes in computing. So, an eight-bit byte could look like this: 11111111. Thats eight ones. Such a byte is often considered a unit of memory size; in this example, this would be an 8-bit memory size.
Most desktop computers or microcomputers as they used to be called these days have 64-bit processors, which means they can handle instructions of 64 bits at a time. And they may have one terabyte of hard disk space, which means they store 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of memory.
All of this is reasonably logical, even if youre eyes can go funny looking at all those zeros.
Looking at the quantum world, however, can make your brain go funny, as nothing is as logical as it is in the binary world.
Its a reasonably well known fact that scientists have observed the same quantum particle in two places at once, the reasons for which they are yet to adequately explain.
But even without explaining the reasons why, scientists and technologists have been able to utilise quantum phenomena to create real-world products like funnily enough computer chips.
The light that binds
Apparently, every element in the periodic table absorbs and emits light of very particular frequencies, and these unique spectral lines are regularly used to identify the composition of various substances, according to an interesting explanation on Forbes.com.
Using this key observation, or set of observations, scientists and technologists have been able to create the modern computer-driven, electronic world.
Quantum computing, however, is looking to go deeper into the quantum world beyond electrons and the light each set of atoms emits. They may even go to the sub-atomic level, where particles can behave in even more extreme and inexplicable ways.
Nonetheless, a number of the leading tech companies IBM, Google, Intel and other chipmakers, and of course D-Wave are developing microprocessors and computing systems based on quantum phenomena.
The companies measure their systems capabilities using something called a qubit, or quantum bit, which is like a bit or binary digit.
The difference is that whereas a bit is either a zero or a one, a qubit can be also either a zero or one or both at the same time because of something called quantum superposition, meaning that, unlike a human being, a quantum being can be in two places at once.
This inexplicable ability is said to hold the promise of quantum computers with far more power than binary computers will ever attain.
Big claims for tiny particles
D-Wave claims its system has 2,000 qubits, although its probably not a good idea at this stage for mere mortals to use such numbers to compare different systems until more is understood about them. Not that theres an awful lot of competitors to D-Waves systems.
IBM has produced a processor for quantum computing which it says is configured in 16-qubit and 17-qubit forms, as reported in Technology Review.
Google says it has built a quantum computer chip which has six qubits, also reported in Technology Review, although the company says designs for devices of 30 to 50 qubits are already in progress.
A number of other companies and organisations including Microsoft, Nasa, the US government, and probably Apple are all working on quantum computing systems.
What this means for the automotive sector, or any other sector, is yet unknown, beyond the obvious the more computing power, the better.
But certainly, VWs investment in the technology shows that the traditional automotive giants have realised the quantum computing is the future of cars and perhaps every other technology, even if no one understands what it is.
Auto manufacturers tend to use very large computing systems in the design and development of vehicles, but whereas they may have hired the capability before, they want to own it now.
Often, such companies will hire time on a supercomputer, and some say that a well-programmed supercomputer is still much faster than any of the quantum computers on the market today.
Supercomputers still rule
The hierarchy of computing power not including cloud or cluster computing might look like the following list, with the most powerful at the top:
Quantum computers are looking to enter the list at the very top, above supercomputers.
One of the reasons for wanting to own or even produce the computing infrastructure, however, could be that, even though todays binary computer chips and systems are said to be capable of autonomously driving a car, tomorrows auto giants could be the ones who build or develop their own custom quantum chips and systems, or at least understand quantum phenomena well enough to write firmware for quantum chips like the ones produced by IBM and Google.
Otherwise they might be left stranded in the binary world, and clearly VW has no intention of being left behind.
Other companies from the automotive sector in Germany are also making significant investments in computing technology.
BMW is busy building a new data centre that is 10 times the size of the companys existing facility, according to the NYT.
Reinhard Stolle, a vice president in charge of artificial intelligence at BMW, said: The processing power needed to deal with all this data is orders of magnitude larger than what we are used to.
The traditional control engineering techniques are just not able to handle the complexity anymore.
Meanwhile,Bosch is building a massive chip factory which will represent the biggest investment in the companys 130-year history.
Bosch chairman Volkmar Denner says: By expanding our manufacturing capacities for semiconductors, we are looking forward to the future and strengthen our competitiveness.
Bosch is one of the worlds leading suppliers of advanced driver assistance systems to the big automotive companies.
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Volkswagen buys D-Wave quantum computers which sell for $15 million each - Robotics and Automation News (press release) (registration)
6 Things Quantum Computers Will Be Incredibly Useful For – Singularity Hub
Computers dont exist in a vacuum. They serve to solve problems, and the type of problems they can solve are influenced by their hardware. Graphics processors are specialized for rendering images; artificial intelligence processors for AI; and quantum computers designed forwhat?
While the power of quantum computing is impressive, it does not mean that existing software simply runs a billion times faster. Rather, quantum computers have certain types of problems which they are good at solving, and those which they arent. Below are some of the primary applications we should expect to see as this next generation of computers becomes commercially available.
A primary application for quantum computing is artificial intelligence (AI). AI is based on the principle of learning from experience, becoming more accurate as feedback is given, until the computer program appears to exhibit intelligence.
This feedback is based on calculating the probabilities for many possible choices, and so AI is an ideal candidate for quantum computation. It promises to disrupt every industry, from automotives to medicine, and its been said AI will be to the twenty-first century what electricity was to the twentieth.
For example, Lockheed Martin plans to use its D-Wave quantum computer to test autopilot software that is currently too complex for classical computers, and Google is using a quantum computer to design software that can distinguish cars from landmarks. We have already reached the point where AI is creating more AI, and so its importance will rapidly escalate.
Another example is precision modeling of molecular interactions, finding the optimum configurations for chemical reactions. Such quantum chemistry is so complex that only the simplest molecules can be analyzed by todays digital computers.
Chemical reactions are quantum in nature as they form highly entangled quantum superposition states. But fully-developed quantum computers would not have any difficulty evaluating even the most complex processes.
Google has already made forays in this field by simulating the energy of hydrogen molecules. The implication of this is more efficient products, from solar cells to pharmaceutical drugs, and especially fertilizer production; since fertilizer accounts for 2 percent of global energy usage, the consequences for energy and the environment would be profound.
Most online security currently depends on the difficulty of factoring large numbers into primes. While this can presently be accomplished by using digital computers to search through every possible factor, the immense time required makes cracking the code expensive and impractical.
Quantum computers can perform such factoring exponentially more efficiently than digital computers, meaning such security methods will soon become obsolete. New cryptography methods are being developed, though it may take time: in August 2015 the NSA began introducing a list of quantum-resistant cryptography methods that would resist quantum computers, and in April 2016 the National Institute of Standards and Technology began a public evaluation process lasting four to six years.
There are also promising quantum encryption methods being developed using the one-way nature of quantum entanglement. City-wide networks have already been demonstrated in several countries, and Chinese scientists recently announced they successfully sent entangled photons from an orbiting quantum satellite to three separate base stations back on Earth.
Modern markets are some of the most complicated systems in existence. While we have developed increasingly scientific and mathematical tools to address this, it still suffers from one major difference between other scientific fields: theres no controlled setting in which to run experiments.
To solve this, investors and analysts have turned to quantum computing. One immediate advantage is that the randomness inherent to quantum computers is congruent to the stochastic nature of financial markets. Investors often wish to evaluate the distribution of outcomes under an extremely large number of scenarios generated at random.
Another advantage quantum offers is that financial operations such as arbitrage may require many path-dependent steps, the number of possibilities quickly outpacing the capacity of a digital computer.
NOAA Chief Economist Rodney F. Weiher claims(PowerPoint file)that nearly 30 percent of the US GDP ($6 trillion) is directly or indirectly affected by weather, impacting food production, transportation, and retail trade, among others. The ability to better predict the weather would have enormous benefit to many fields, not to mention more time to take cover from disasters.
While this has long been a goal of scientists, the equations governing such processes contain many, many variables, making classical simulation lengthy. As quantum researcher Seth Lloyd pointed out, Using a classical computer to perform such analysis might take longer than it takes the actual weather to evolve! This motivated Lloyd and colleagues at MIT to show that the equations governing the weather possess a hidden wave nature which are amenable to solution by a quantum computer.
Director of engineering at Google Hartmut Neven also noted that quantum computers could help build better climate models that could give us more insight into how humans are influencing the environment. These models are what we build our estimates of future warming on, and help us determine what steps need to be taken now to prevent disasters.
The United Kingdoms national weather service Met Office has already begun investing in such innovation to meet the power and scalability demands theyll be facing in the 2020-plus timeframe, and released a report on its own requirements for exascale computing.
Coming full circle, a final application of this exciting new physics might be studying exciting new physics. Models of particle physics are often extraordinarily complex, confounding pen-and-paper solutions and requiring vast amounts of computing time for numerical simulation. This makes them ideal for quantum computation, and researchers have already been taking advantage of this.
Researchers at the University of Innsbruck and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) recently used a programmable quantum system to perform such a simulation. Published in Nature, the team used a simple version of quantum computer in which ions performed logical operations, the basic steps in any computer calculation. This simulation showed excellent agreement compared toactual experiments of the physics described.
These two approaches complement one another perfectly, says theoretical physicist Peter Zoller. We cannot replace the experiments that are done with particle colliders. However, by developing quantum simulators, we may be able to understand these experiments better one day.
Investors are now scrambling to insert themselves into the quantum computing ecosystem, and its not just the computer industry: banks, aerospace companies, and cybersecurity firms are among those taking advantage of the computational revolution.
While quantum computing is already impacting the fields listed above, the list is by no means exhaustive, and thats the most exciting part. As with all new technology, presently unimaginable applications will be developed as the hardware continues to evolve and create new opportunities.
Image Credit:IQOQI Innsbruck/Harald Ritsch
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6 Things Quantum Computers Will Be Incredibly Useful For - Singularity Hub
Quantum Machine Learning Computer Hybrids at the Center of New Start-Ups – TrendinTech
Creative Destruction Lab, a technology program affiliated with the University of Torontos Rotman School of Management in Toronto, Canada hopes to nurture numerous quantum learning machine start-ups in only a few years. This still new form of hybrid computing combines the computational speed and power of quantum computers with machine learning, the technical term for AI like Siri or Alexa.
Currently, researchers are mostly focused using the emergent technology of quantum computers to help machine learning programs to solve problems quicker or to use typical machine learning builds to add stability and potency to quantum computers. However, the end goal of either direction is to use many AI programs based on quantum computers to comprehend or better datasets and results from larger quantum calculations. Unfortunately, this goal will not be achieved until quantum computers are fully built and operational. While Google has a plan to build a 49-qubit machine by the end of the year, the hundred or thousand qubit computer that researchers hope for is still years or work away.
Despite being far afield, Peter Wittek, a researcher from the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Spain and academic director of the Creative Destruction Lab, says that doesnt stop scientists from theorizing or even experimenting in the realm of quantum machine learning, a young field full of promise.
To build universal quantum computers is a big engineering challenge, says Wittek. But it turns out for quantum machine learning you need something less. In the same way that quantum cryptography and quantum random number generation have been developed without large sized quantum computers, he says, so too could the field of quantum machine learning.
Wittek, who wrote **Quantum Machine Learning: What Quantum Computing Means to Data Mining, says that after the HHL quantum algorithm, named after its developers Aram Harrow, Avinathan Hassidim, and Seth Lloyd, was created, the field really came into its own. The algorithm solves massive linear algebra equations with many undefined variables in less time than any current supercomputer is capable. A large part of machine learning involves similar high-dimension algebra at which HHL excels and many researchers have flocked to HHL for this reason.
Although, even with all its unique properties, says Wittek, there are many besides HHL with perhaps more potential for sooner application in fields such as medicine, transportation, and finance.
Still, he adds, a quantum system will be a definite challenge to GPU-based machine learning, even if big names like Google and IBM can build a usable quantum computer. Machine learning, as it used today, is impressive enough.
On the other hand, when it comes to generating random numbers, typical machine learning falls short, according to Wittek. Specifically utilized in financial applications, Monte Carlo algorithms need truly random numbers to work ideally but conventional computing can only manage pseudo-randomness. This is where quantum machine learning could shine as they are designed around randomness.
Another advantage to quantum machine learning systems, according to Nathan Weibe, a researcher with Microsofts Quantum Architectures and Computation Group, is the use of a qubit versus the traditional binary bit system.
If you think about a quantum computer, how do you understand whats going on inside one? Wiebe says. The vectors that describe it exist in an incomprehensibly large space. Theres no way you can go through, read off every single entry of those vectors and figure out if the machine is working properly.
While HHL has been very popular in recent technical literature, Scott Aaronson, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, says that it has more value as hype than in application any time soon. In a 2015 review, Aaronson debates whether a Buyer Beware tag should accompany all quantum machine learning promises.
Almost all the quantum machine learning algorithms that have been published over the last decade are really frameworks for algorithms, Aaronson says. Theyre algorithms that dont start with the classical problem that you would like to be solved and the answer to that problem.
However, skepticism has not dulled enthusiasm for the possibilities in a quantum machine learning system and near-term application. The number of applications for the Creative Destruction Labs start-up boot camp in Toronto has exceeded expectations with 38 applicants for the 40 spots. As the application period is open until July 24th, its obvious that cutting edge entrepreneurs remain undaunted by neither the critics or the challenges ahead.
Incorporation must be done by November, so these will be real companies, Wittek says. And the hope is by next summer well have companies raising money.
**Quantum machine learning is an emerging interdisciplinary research area at the intersection of quantum physics and machine learning. One can distinguish four different ways of merging the two parent disciplines.Quantum machine learning algorithms can use the advantages of quantum computation in order to improve classical methods of machine learning, for example by developing efficient implementations of expensive classical algorithms on a quantum computer.
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Quantum Machine Learning Computer Hybrids at the Center of New Start-Ups - TrendinTech
Israel Enters Quantum Computer Race, Placing Encryption at Ever-Greater Risk – Sputnik International
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19:29 19.06.2017 Get short URL
The Universitysays the US$2.13 million system, tobe developed atits Quantum Information Science Center laboratory, will use single photons asthe communications medium quantum bits make it possible toperform calculations innew ways that are not possible incurrent communications systems or even supercomputers.
Current methods ofencrypting data are increasingly vulnerable toattacks, asthe increased power ofquantum computing comes online.
Quantum communication systems use the laws ofphysics tosecure data and are therefore resistant toattacks.
Professor Nadav Katz, Director ofthe Quantum Information Science Center, said the project would position Israel inthe "leading edge" ofresearch towardultimately secured communication systems. While a fresh tender, the center was originally founded in2013, and recruited an interdisciplinary team ofover 20 researchers fromphysics, computer science, mathematics, chemistry, philosophy and engineering toits ranks.
However, the privacy conscious and techies alike may be disappointed inthe project's objectives rather thanfocusing onprotecting individual data, the system will instead be designed tobeef upthe government's quantum communications capabilities, and give Israeli officials the ability toprotect themselves againsthackers and other potentially malicious forces.
Quantum information research is one ofthe biggest growth areas in21st century science, promising dramatic improvements incomputation speed and secure communication. Based onthe inherent wave-like nature ofmatter and light, it will theoretically lead tomassive leaps forward inhuman ability tofabricate, control, measure and understand advanced structures.
Competition inthe field is rapidly gathering pace, withChina inJune showing offthe results ofits first Earth-to-satellite quantum entanglement experimentlast week, using the Micius satellite launched in2016. The satellite is said tohave "teleportation-like" communication capabilities, which cannot be hacked.
Meanwhile, back onEarth, the best-developed quantum communications application is quantum key distribution companies such asQuintessenceLabs and ID Quantique exploit the quantum properties ofphotons toprotect encryption keys generated bytheir appliances, beforeusing the keys toencrypt data transmitted overconventional channels.
As such, it is inevitable governments will be the first toget their hands onmost quantum technology whether communications or computers.
The cost involved inresearch and development cannot be borne byprivate businesses, much less individuals and ontop ofboasting the requisite funds forthe task, governments would also be granted a head start indigital spying and surveillance.
Quantum computers will be most effective atbreaking encryption, due totheir hyperactive number crunching capabilities and given governmental dedication toending encryption, most notably inthe UK,there's no doubt the technology is being doggedly pursued precisely forthis reason.
The obvious upshot ofthis would be that governments would be able toheavily insulate their own data fromoutsiders, while throwing open the vast majority ofpublic data totheir own scrutiny.
What's more, it's evident fromtheNSA's XKeyscore program, asrevealed byEdward Snowden,that Western spying agencies are storing vast quantities ofencrypted data they cannot currently crack, inthe hope once a requisitely powerful quantum computer actually exists, it can retrospectively break intothose communications.
Past, current and future data may not be safe fromprying official eyes formuch longer.
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Israel Enters Quantum Computer Race, Placing Encryption at Ever-Greater Risk - Sputnik International
Prototype device enables photon-photon interactions at room … – Phys.Org
June 19, 2017 by Larry Hardesty A micrograph of the MIT researchers new device, with a visualization of electrical-energy measurements and a schematic of the device layout superimposed on it. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ordinarily, light particlesphotonsdon't interact. If two photons collide in a vacuum, they simply pass through each other.
An efficient way to make photons interact could open new prospects for both classical optics and quantum computing, an experimental technology that promises large speedups on some types of calculations.
In recent years, physicists have enabled photon-photon interactions using atoms of rare elements cooled to very low temperatures.
But in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters, MIT researchers describe a new technique for enabling photon-photon interactions at room temperature, using a silicon crystal with distinctive patterns etched into it. In physics jargon, the crystal introduces "nonlinearities" into the transmission of an optical signal.
"All of these approaches that had atoms or atom-like particles require low temperatures and work over a narrow frequency band," says Dirk Englund, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and senior author on the new paper. "It's been a holy grail to come up with methods to realize single-photon-level nonlinearities at room temperature under ambient conditions."
Joining Englund on the paper are Hyeongrak Choi, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, and Mikkel Heuck, who was a postdoc in Englund's lab when the work was done and is now at the Technical University of Denmark.
Photonic independence
Quantum computers harness a strange physical property called "superposition," in which a quantum particle can be said to inhabit two contradictory states at the same time. The spin, or magnetic orientation, of an electron, for instance, could be both up and down at the same time; the polarization of a photon could be both vertical and horizontal.
If a string of quantum bitsor qubits, the quantum analog of the bits in a classical computeris in superposition, it can, in some sense, canvass multiple solutions to the same problem simultaneously, which is why quantum computers promise speedups.
Most experimental qubits use ions trapped in oscillating magnetic fields, superconducting circuits, orlike Englund's own researchdefects in the crystal structure of diamonds. With all these technologies, however, superpositions are difficult to maintain.
Because photons aren't very susceptible to interactions with the environment, they're great at maintaining superposition; but for the same reason, they're difficult to control. And quantum computing depends on the ability to send control signals to the qubits.
That's where the MIT researchers' new work comes in. If a single photon enters their device, it will pass through unimpeded. But if two photonsin the right quantum statestry to enter the device, they'll be reflected back.
The quantum state of one of the photons can thus be thought of as controlling the quantum state of the other. And quantum information theory has established that simple quantum "gates" of this type are all that is necessary to build a universal quantum computer.
Unsympathetic resonance
The researchers' device consists of a long, narrow, rectangular silicon crystal with regularly spaced holes etched into it. The holes are widest at the ends of the rectangle, and they narrow toward its center. Connecting the two middle holes is an even narrower channel, and at its center, on opposite sides, are two sharp concentric tips. The pattern of holes temporarily traps light in the device, and the concentric tips concentrate the electric field of the trapped light.
The researchers prototyped the device and showed that it both confined light and concentrated the light's electric field to the degree predicted by their theoretical models. But turning the device into a quantum gate would require another component, a dielectric sandwiched between the tips. (A dielectric is a material that is ordinarily electrically insulating but will become polarizedall its positive and negative charges will align in the same directionwhen exposed to an electric field.)
When a light wave passes close to a dielectric, its electric field will slightly displace the electrons of the dielectric's atoms. When the electrons spring back, they wobble, like a child's swing when it's pushed too hard. This is the nonlinearity that the researchers' system exploits.
The size and spacing of the holes in the device are tailored to a specific light frequencythe device's "resonance frequency." But the nonlinear wobbling of the dielectric's electrons should shift that frequency.
Ordinarily, that shift is mild enough to be negligible. But because the sharp tips in the researchers' device concentrate the electric fields of entering photons, they also exaggerate the shift. A single photon could still get through the device. But if two photons attempted to enter it, the shift would be so dramatic that they'd be repulsed.
Practical potential
The device can be configured so that the dramatic shift in resonance frequency occurs only if the photons attempting to enter it have particular quantum propertiesspecific combinations of polarization or phase, for instance. The quantum state of one photon could thus determine the way in which the other photon is handled, the basic requirement for a quantum gate.
Englund emphasizes that the new research will not yield a working quantum computer in the immediate future. Too often, light entering the prototype is still either scattered or absorbed, and the quantum states of the photons can become slightly distorted. But other applications may be more feasible in the near term. For instance, a version of the device could provide a reliable source of single photons, which would greatly abet a range of research in quantum information science and communications.
"This work is quite remarkable and unique because it shows strong light-matter interaction, localization of light, and relatively long-time storage of photons at such a tiny scale in a semiconductor," says Mohammad Soltani, a nanophotonics researcher in Raytheon BBN Technologies' Quantum Information Processing Group. "It can enable things that were questionable before, like nonlinear single-photon gates for quantum information. It works at room temperature, it's solid-state, and it's compatible with semiconductor manufacturing. This work is among the most promising to date for practical devices, such as quantum information devices."
Explore further: Unpolarized single-photon generation with true randomness from diamond
More information: Hyeongrak Choi et al. Self-Similar Nanocavity Design with Ultrasmall Mode Volume for Single-Photon Nonlinearities, Physical Review Letters (2017). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.223605
This story is republished courtesy of MIT News (web.mit.edu/newsoffice/), a popular site that covers news about MIT research, innovation and teaching.
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Great advance but very confusing title. With this technique Photons do not interact between them , each one only interacts with the material.
Okay, right away, I don't understand the concept of photons that "simply pass through each other." It would make way more sense if photons "simply" bounce off each other and fly the opposite way, if colliding in a vacuum. They're already going the speed of light, so there's no elasticity. Please, show me the evidence and research!
This is an excellent approach to the modern comprehension of field and matter interacting. Yes, two photons pass through one another (without change) by the law of Superposition, which is not a new concept by many decades. Now, finally, matter is now considered as an electronic system as was the original Planck atom model in the year 1900. Each of the two photons act primarily on the electrons in an atom or molecule, and the atom is analyzed as and electronic system rather than "matter". This, in turn, produces new electromagnetic waves that add to those of the photons. Not a new concept by far, but realistic, and with the newer methodology of measurements of actions at the short wavelengths of the fields will most likely lead to many new concepts. I have proposed analyzing atomic interactions utilizing electronic atom models and computer analysis ("Analyzing Atoms Using the SPICE Computer Program", Computing in Science and Engineering, Vol. 14, No. 3, May/June 2012). TBC.
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Prototype device enables photon-photon interactions at room ... - Phys.Org
The Quantum Computer Factory That’s Taking on Google and IBM – WIRED
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The Quantum Computer Factory That's Taking on Google and IBM - WIRED