Quantum Computers  

A major hurdle in the development of quantum computers has been overcome through the development of the world’s first programmable and scalable system. Researchers have learned how to control quantum particles with the precision necessary to run quantum algorithms on a small scale with just a few qubits.

Researchers at the University of Maryland in College Park have unveiled a five-qubit quantum computer module that can be programmed to run any quantum algorithm. They say their module can be linked to others to perform powerful quantum computations involving large numbers of qubits.

The study, 'Demonstration of a programmable quantum computer module', has been published online.

“This small quantum computer can be scaled to larger numbers of qubits within a single module, and can be further expanded by connecting many modules,” say Shantanu Debnath.

"This small quantum computer can be scaled to larger numbers of qubits within a single module, and can be further expanded by connecting many modules."

The new device builds on work over the last two decades on trapped ion quantum computers. The device uses five ytterbium ions lined up and trapped in an electromagnetic field. The electronic state of each ion can be controlled by engaging it with a laser. This allows each ion to store a bit of quantum information.

Because they are charged, the ions exert a force on each other, and this causes them to vibrate at frequencies that can be precisely controlled and manipulated. These vibrations are quantum in nature and allow the ions to become entangled.

Wiht this method, the quantum bits, or quibits they hold can interact.

Controlling these interactions, the physicists can carry out quantum logic operations. Quantum algorithms are simply a series of these logic operations one after the other.

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Few of the quantum computers developed so far are capable of doing multiple operations; most have been designed to perform a only specific single quantum algorithm.

The Maryland researchers have built a self-contained module capable of addressing each of the ions with a laser and reading out the results of the interaction between qubits. So far he team has put the device through many tests, implementing several different quantum algorithms:

“As examples, we implement the Deutsch-Jozsa, Bernstein-Vazirani, and quantum Fourier transform algorithms,” they say. “The algorithms presented here illustrate the computational flexibility provided by the ion trap quantum architecture.”

This impressive work is only the tip of the iceberg say the researchers. They also claim that their module is scalable—that several five-qubit modules can be connected together to form a much more powerful quantum computer.

"This small quantum computer can be scaled to larger numbers of qubits within a single module, and can be further expanded by connecting many modules through ion shuttling rr photonic quantum channels," write the researchers.

The team has not yet demonstrated this scalability, but it is their next logical step. What Debnath and his team need to do next is show how to connect these modules and how this increases the utility of the computations that are possible.

If successful, such a development would be a watershed moment for quantum computer progress.

SOURCE  MIT Technology Review

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 Quantum Computers  

In a milestone development the company says will allow research into more complex quantum calculation problems, D-Wave has announced that it's new processor will break the 1000 quibit barrier.

D-Wave Systems has announced that it has broken the 1000 qubit barrier, developing a processor about double the size of the Canadian company’s previous generation and far surpassing the number of qubits ever developed by D-Wave or any other quantum effort.  This is a major technological and scientific achievement that will allow significantly more complex computational problems to be solved than was possible on any previous quantum computer.

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It seems like Rose's Law of Quantum Computing may be as much a self-fulfilling prophecy as it's predecessor, Moore's Law has been.

D-Wave’s quantum computer runs a quantum annealing algorithm to find the lowest points, corresponding to optimal or near optimal solutions, in a virtual “energy landscape.” Every additional qubit doubles the search space of the processor. At 1000 qubits, the new processor considers 21000 possibilities simultaneously, a search space which dwarfs the 2512 possibilities available to the 512-qubit D-Wave Two. ‪In fact, the new search space contains far more possibilities than there are ‪particles in the observable universe.

"D-Wave is at the forefront of this space today with customers like NASA and Google, and this latest advancement will contribute significantly to the evolution of the Quantum Computing industry."

“For the high-performance computing industry, the promise of quantum computing is very exciting. It offers the potential to solve important problems that either can’t be solved today or would take an unreasonable amount of time to solve,” said Earl Joseph, IDC program vice president for HPC. “D-Wave is at the forefront of this space today with customers like NASA and Google, and this latest advancement will contribute significantly to the evolution of the Quantum Computing industry.”

As the sole manufacturer of scalable quantum processors, D-Wave breaks new ground with every succeeding generation it develops. The new processors, comprising over 128,000 Josephson tunnel junctions, are believed to be the most complex superconductor integrated circuits ever successfully yielded.

“Temperature, noise, and precision all play a profound role in how well quantum processors solve problems.  Beyond scaling up the technology by doubling the number of qubits, we also achieved key technology advances prioritized around their impact on performance,” said Jeremy Hilton, D-Wave vice president, processor development. “We expect to release benchmarking data that demonstrate new levels of performance later this year.”

The 1000-qubit milestone is the result of intensive research and development by D-Wave. The research and development effort also means:

• Lower Operating Temperature: While the previous generation processor ran at a temperature close to absolute zero, the new processor runs 40% colder. The lower operating temperature enhances the importance of quantum effects, which increases the ability to discriminate the best result from a collection of good candidates.​
• Reduced Noise: Through a combination of improved design, architectural enhancements and materials changes, noise levels have been reduced by 50% in comparison to the previous generation. The lower noise environment enhances problem-solving performance while boosting reliability and stability.
• Increased Control Circuitry Precision: In the testing to date, the increased precision coupled with the noise reduction has demonstrated improved precision by up to 40%. To accomplish both while also improving manufacturing yield is a significant achievement.
• Advanced Fabrication:  The new processors comprise over 128,000 Josephson junctions (tunnel junctions with superconducting electrodes) in a 6-metal layer planar process with 0.25μm features, believed to be the most complex superconductor integrated circuits ever built.
• New Modes of Use: The new technology expands the boundaries of ways to exploit quantum resources.  In addition to performing discrete optimization like its predecessor, firmware and software upgrades will make it easier to use the system for sampling applications.

“Breaking the 1000 qubit barrier marks the culmination of years of research and development by our scientists, engineers and manufacturing team,” said D-Wave CEO Vern Brownell. “It is a critical step toward bringing the promise of quantum computing to bear on some of the most challenging technical, commercial, scientific, and national defense problems that organizations face.”


SOURCE  D-Wave

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 Quantum Computers  

Researchers have made major step forward in effectively enhancing the fluorescent light emission of diamond nitrogen vacancy centers -- a key step to using the atom-sized defects in future quantum computers. The technique hinges on the very precise positioning of NV centers within a structure called a photonic cavity that can boost the light signal from the defect.

In the quest to design the world's first universal quantum computer, a special kind of diamond defect called a nitrogen vacancy (NV) center is demonstrating a lot of potential. NV centers consist of a nitrogen atom and a vacant site that together replace two adjacent carbon atoms in diamond crystal. The defects can record or store quantum information and transmit it in the form of light, but the weak signal is hard to identify, extract and transmit unless it is intensified.

Now a team of researchers at Harvard, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Chicago has taken a major step forward in effectively enhancing the fluorescent light emission of diamond nitrogen vacancy centers – a key step to using the atom-sized defects in future quantum computers. The technique, described in the journal Applied Physics Letters, hinges on the very precise positioning of NV centers within a structure called a photonic cavity that can boost the light signal from the defect.

NV centers contain an unpaired electron that can store information in a property known as spin. Researchers can "read" the spin state of the electron by observing the intensity of particular frequencies of the light that the NV center emits when illuminated by a laser.

"Integrating a plane of spins into these structures enables us to engineering the spin-photon interaction and exploit quantum effects for future technologies."

At room temperatures, this pattern of light emission couples to multiple "sideband" frequencies, making it difficult to interpret. To amplify the most important element of the signal researchers can use a structure called a photonic cavity, which consists of a pattern of nanoscale holes that serve to enhance the NV center's light emission at its main frequency.

"A photonic cavity that is properly matched to the NVs can substantially augment their capabilities," said Evelyn Hu, a researcher at Harvard whose group studies the optical and electronic behavior of materials that have been carefully sculpted at the nanoscale.

A scanning electron microscope image of the diamond photonic cavity shows the nanoscale holes etched through the layer containing NV centers. The scale bar indicates 200 nanometers. Image Source- Evelyn Hu/Harvard

NV centers whose signal is enhanced by photonic cavities could act as qubits, the fundamental units of quantum information in a quantum computer.

Photonic cavities best enhance the signal of NV centers located in a "hot spot" where the cavities' resonant fields are strongest, but making sure an atom-sized defect's location matches up with this spot is extremely tricky.

"Strong spatial overlap is the hardest [task] to achieve in designing and fabricating a photonic cavity for NV centers," Hu said.

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She compared the task to turning on a fixed small light beam in a dark room containing ultra-small transmitters that send out information once they are illuminated by the 'right' beam. If the match is right, the signal from the transmitter is returned strongly, but the challenge is that the chances of the light hitting the transmitter are very small.

Hu and her colleagues ultimately aim to make sure the beam (or field of the photonic cavity) will always hit the transmitter (or NV center), so that information will always be read out. They can do this by knowing the exact position of the tiny NV centers.

The team took an important first step toward this goal by controlling the depth of the diamond defects using a technique called delta doping. "Integrating a plane of spins into these structures enables us to engineering the spin-photon interaction and exploit quantum effects for future technologies," said David Awschalom, a researcher at the University of Chicago whose group grows and characterizes these systems. The technique confines the possible location of NV centers to a layer approximately 6 nanometers thick sandwiched inside a diamond membrane approximately 200 nanometers thick. The researchers then etched holes into the membrane to create the photonic cavities.

Using this method the researchers were able to increase the intensity of the light emitted by the NV centers by a factor of about 30 times.

The team believes they can further enhance the emission by also controlling the position of the defects in the horizontal plane and are currently working on possible ways to achieve full 3D control.

Nitrogen vacancy centers aren't the only candidate for qubits, but they have attracted a lot of interest because their electrons have long spin lifetimes at room temperature, meaning they can maintain quantum information for a relatively long time.

The promise of NV centers doesn't stop at ultrafast computers. NV centers can also be used in non-computing applications, for examples as molecular-scale magnetic and temperature sensors that could measure the properties within single cells.


SOURCE  Alpha Galileo

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 Quantum Computing  

Researchers have developed two different types of quantum bit, or “qubit” – the building block for quantum computers – that each process quantum data with an accuracy above 99 percent.

Two research teams working in the same laboratories at the University of New South Wales in  Australia have found distinct solutions to a critical challenge that has held back the realization of super powerful quantum computers.

"We've now come up with two parallel pathways for building a quantum computer in silicon, each of which shows this super accuracy."

The teams created two types of quantum bits, or "qubits" – the building blocks for quantum computers – that each process quantum data with an accuracy above 99%. The two findings have been published simultaneously today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

"For quantum computing to become a reality we need to operate the bits with very low error rates," says Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak, who is Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW, where the devices were made.

"We've now come up with two parallel pathways for building a quantum computer in silicon, each of which shows this super accuracy," adds Associate Professor Andrea Morello from UNSW's School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications.

A functional quantum computer will provide much faster computation in three key areas: searching large databases, solving complicated sets of equations, and modelling atomic systems such as biological molecules and drugs. This means they’ll be enormously useful for finance and healthcare industries, and for government, security and defense organisations. Functional quantum computers will also open the door for new types of computational applications and solutions that are probably too premature to even conceive.

Now the team led by Dzurak has discovered a way to create an "artificial atom" qubit with a device remarkably similar to the silicon transistors used in consumer electronics, known as MOSFETs. Post-doctoral researcher Menno Veldhorst, lead author on the paper reporting the artificial atom qubit, says, "It is really amazing that we can make such an accurate qubit using pretty much the same devices as we have in our laptops and phones".

Meanwhile, Morello's team has been pushing the "natural" phosphorus atom qubit to the extremes of performance. Dr Juha Muhonen, a post-doctoral researcher and lead author on the natural atom qubit paper, notes: "The phosphorus atom contains in fact two qubits: the electron, and the nucleus. With the nucleus in particular, we have achieved accuracy close to 99.99%. That means only one error for every 10,000 quantum operations."

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Dzurak explains that, "even though methods to correct errors do exist, their effectiveness is only guaranteed if the errors occur less than 1% of the time. Our experiments are among the first in solid-state, and the first-ever in silicon, to fulfill this requirement."

The high-accuracy operations for both natural and artificial atom qubits is achieved by placing each inside a thin layer of specially purified silicon, containing only the silicon-28 isotope. This isotope is perfectly non-magnetic and, unlike those in naturally occurring silicon, does not disturb the quantum bit. The purified silicon was provided through collaboration with Professor Kohei Itoh from Keio University in Japan.

The next step for the researchers is to build pairs of highly accurate quantum bits. Large quantum computers are expected to consist of many thousands or millions of qubits and may integrate both natural and artificial atoms.

Morello's research team also established a world-record "coherence time" for a single quantum bit held in solid state. "Coherence time is a measure of how long you can preserve quantum information before it's lost," Morello says. The longer the coherence time, the easier it becomes to perform long sequences of operations, and therefore more complex calculations.

The team was able to store quantum information in a phosphorus nucleus for more than 30 seconds. "Half a minute is an eternity in the quantum world. Preserving a 'quantum superposition' for such a long time, and inside what is basically a modified version of a normal transistor, is something that almost nobody believed possible until today," Morello says.

"For our two groups to simultaneously obtain these dramatic results with two quite different systems is very special, in particular because we are really great mates," adds Dzurak.




SOURCE  UNSW

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 Quantum Computing  

A normally fragile quantum state has been shown to survive at room temperature for a world record 39 minutes, overcoming a key barrier towards building ultrafast quantum computers.

An international team including Stephanie Simmons of Oxford University report in this week's Science a test performed as part of a project led by Mike Thewalt of Simon Fraser University, Canada, and colleagues. In conventional computers, data is stored as a string of 1s and 0s. In the experiment, quantum bits of information, 'qubits', were put into a 'superposition' state in which they can be both 1s and 0 at the same time – enabling them to perform multiple calculations simultaneously.

In the experiment, the team raised the temperature of a system, in which information is encoded in the nuclei of phosphorus atoms in silicon, from -269°C to 25°C and demonstrated that the superposition states survived at this balmy temperature for 39 minutes – outside of silicon the previous record for such a state's survival at room temperature was around two seconds. The team even found that they could manipulate the qubits as the temperature of the system rose, and that they were robust enough for this information to survive being 'refrozen' (the optical technique used to read the qubits only works at very low temperatures).

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'Thirty-nine minutes may not seem very long but as it only takes one-hundred-thousandth of a second to flip the nuclear spin of a phosphorus ion – the type of operation used to run quantum calculations – in theory over two million operations could be applied in the time it takes for the superposition to naturally decay by 1%. Having such robust, as well as long-lived, qubits could prove very helpful for anyone trying to build a quantum computer,' said Stephanie Simmons of Oxford University's Department of Materials, an author of the paper.

'This opens up the possibility of truly long-term coherent information storage at room temperature,' said Mike Thewalt, who performed the test at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, with colleagues.

The team began with a sliver of silicon doped with small amounts of other elements, including phosphorus. Quantum information was encoded in the nuclei of the phosphorus atoms: each nucleus has an intrinsic quantum property called 'spin', which acts like a tiny bar magnet when placed in a magnetic field. Spins can be manipulated to point up (0), down (1), or any angle in between, representing a superposition of the two other states.

The team prepared their sample at just 4°C above absolute zero (-269°C) and placed it in a magnetic field. Additional magnetic field pulses were used to tilt the direction of the nuclear spin and create the superposition states. When the sample was held at this cryogenic temperature, the nuclear spins of about 37% of the ions – a typical benchmark to measure quantum coherence – remained in their superposition state for three hours. The same fraction survived for 39 minutes when the temperature of the system was raised to 25°C.

'These lifetimes are at least ten times longer than those measured in previous experiments,' said Stephanie Simmons. 'We've managed to identify a system that seems to have basically no noise. They're high-performance qubits.'

There is still some work ahead before the team can carry out large-scale quantum computations. The nuclear spins of the 10 billion or so phosphorus ions used in this experiment were all placed in the same quantum state. To run calculations, however, physicists will need to place different qubits in different states. 'To have them controllably talking to one another – that would address the last big remaining challenge,' said Simmons.

A report of the research, entitled 'Room-Temperature Quantum Bit Storage Exceeding 39 Minutes Using Ionized Donors in Silicon-28', is published in this week's Science.



SOURCE  University of Oxford

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 Quantum Computers  

At Australia's Centre for Quantum Computation & Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales, researchers assembled from all over the world are working hard to make quantum computers a reality.

At Australia's Centre for Quantum Computation & Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales, researchers assembled from all over the world are working hard to make quantum computers a reality.

The researchers have proposed a new way to distinguish between quantum bits that are placed only a few nanometres apart in a silicon chip, taking them a step closer to the construction of a large-scale quantum computer.

Quantum bits, or qubits, are the basic building blocks of quantum computers - ultra-powerful devices that will offer enormous advantages for solving complex problems.

Professor Michelle Simmons, leader of the research team, said a qubit based on the spin of an individual electron bound to a phosphorus atom within a silicon chip is one of the most promising systems for building a practical quantum computer, due to silicon’s widespread use in the microelectronics industry.

“However, to be able to couple electron-spins on single atom qubits, the qubits need to be placed with atomic precision, within just a few tens of nanometres of each other,” she says.

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“This poses a technical problem in how to make them, and an operational problem in how to control them independently when they are so close together.”

The UNSW team, in collaboration with theorists at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, has found a solution to both these problems. Their study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

In a significant feat of atomic engineering, they were able to read-out the spins of individual electrons on a cluster of phosphorus atoms that had been placed precisely in silicon. They also propose a new method for distinguishing between neighbouring qubits that are only a few nanometres apart.

“It is a daunting challenge to rotate the spin of each qubit individually,” says Holger Büch, lead author of the new study.

“But if each electron is hosted by a different number of phosphorus atoms, then the qubits will respond to different electromagnetic fields – and each qubit can be distinguished from the others around it,” he says.

The UNSW team is part of the Australian Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, a world-leading research centre headquartered in Sydney, Australia.

“This first demonstration that we can maintain long spin lifetimes of electrons on multi-donor systems is very powerful. It offers a new method for addressing individual qubits, putting us one step closer to realising a practical, large-scale quantum computer.” says Simmons.

To make the tiny device, the researchers deposited a layer of hydrogen on a silicon wafer and used a scanning tunnelling microscope to create a pattern on the surface in an ultra-high vacuum.

This was then exposed to phosphine gas and annealed at 350 degrees so phosphorus atoms became incorporated precisely into the silicon. The device was then buried in another layer of silicon.

In a quantum computer information is stored in the spin, or magnetic orientation, of an electron. This spin can not only be in the two "classical" states – up and down – but also in a combination of both states at the same time, allowing exponentially larger amounts of information to be stored and processed in parallel.

SOURCE  University of New South Wales

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 Quantum Computers  

In a new video from Big Think, physicist and author Lawrence Krauss describes quantum computing and the technical obstacles we need to overcome to realize this ambitious technological goal.

In the video above from Big Think, Lawrence Krauss describes quantum computing and the technical obstacles we need to overcome to realize this Holy Grail of processing.

According to Krauss, author of A Universe from Nothing, the difference between a quantum computer and a regular computer, is at some level. In a regular computer, you've got ones and zeros, which you store in binary form and you manipulate them and they do calculations.

In the quantum world, explains Krausss, particles like electrons are actually spinning in all directions at the same time, one of the weird aspects of quantum mechanics. We may measure, by doing a measurement of an electron, find it's spinning this way. But before we did the measurement, it was spinning this way and this way and that way and that way all at the same time.

This means, if the electron's spinning in many different directions at the same time, if we don't actually measure it, it can be doing many computations at the same time. "And so a quantum computer is based on manipulating the state of particles like electrons so that during the calculation, many different calculations are being performed at the same time, and only making a measurement at the end of the computation."

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If we could exploit that fact of quantum mechanics that particles could do many things at the same time, we would be able to do many computations at same time. And that's what would make a quantum computer so powerful.

"One of the reasons it's so difficult to make a quantum computer, and one of the reasons I'm a little skeptical at the moment, is that - the reason the quantum world seems so strange to us is that we don't behave quantum mechanically. I don't -- you know, you can - not me, but you could run towards the wall behind us from now 'til the end of the universe and bang your head in to it and you'd just get a tremendous headache," states Krauss. "But if you're an electron, there's a probability if I throw it towards the wall that it will disappear and appear on the other side due to something called quantum tunneling, okay."

Krauss is therefore in the camp that says the D-Wave system is not, in fact, a quantum computer. This despite the rising support that the Burnaby B.C.-based company's product is the real thing.  

Krauss maintains that the problem with a quantum computer is essentially quantum behavior.

"You want to make this macroscopic object, you want to keep it behaving quantum mechanically which means isolating it very carefully from, within itself, all the interactions and the outside world. And that's the hard part, Is isolating things enough to maintain this what's called quantum coherence. And that's the challenge and it's a huge challenge."

The potential of quantum computers is unbelievably great. Once you can engineer materials on a scale where quantum mechanical properties are important, a whole new world of phenomenon opens up.

Krauss says, "You might be able to say - as we say, if we created a quantum computer, and I'm not - I must admit I'm skeptical that we'll be able to do that in the near-term, but if we could, we'd be able to do computations in a finite time that would take longer than the age of the universe right now. We'd be able to do strange and wonderful things. And of course, if you ask me what's the next big breakthrough, I'll tell you what I always tell people, which is if I knew, I'd be doing it right now."


SOURCE  Big Think

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 Quantum Computers  

In a recent conversation with Singularity Weblog's Nikola Danaylov, D-Wave Computer's Geordie Rose covered a variety of interesting topics such as: how wrestling competitively created an opportunity for him to discover Quantum Mechanics; why he decided to become an entrepreneur building computers at the edge of science and technology.

Geordie Rose is a founder and Chief Technology Officer at D-Wave Computers.

During a recent conversation with Singularity Weblog's Nikola Danaylov, Rose covered a variety of interesting topics such as: how wrestling competitively created an opportunity for him to discover Quantum Mechanics; why he decided to become an entrepreneur building computers at the edge of science and technology; what the name D-wave stands for; what is a quantum computer; and why fabrication technology is the greatest limiting factor towards commoditizing quantum computing.

Rose also explains Vesuvius – D-Wave’s latest model, and the kinds of problems it can compute; Rose’s Law as the quantum computer version of Moore’s Law; how D-wave resolves the de-coherence/interference problem; the traditional von Neumann architecture behind classical computer design and why D-Wave had to move beyond it; Vesuvius’ computational power as compared to similarly priced classical super-computers and the inherent difficulties in accurate bench-marking; Eric Ladizinski’s qubit and the velodrome metaphor used to describe it; the skepticism among numerous scientists as to whether D-Wave really makes quantum computers or not; whether Geordie feels occasionally like Charles Babbage trying to build his difference engine; his prediction that quantum computers will help us create AI by 2029; whether the brain is more like a classical or quantum computer; and how you can apply for programming time on the two D-wave quantum computers.

In the interview, Rose also offers his take on the technological Singularity.

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According to Rose, “Machine learning is progressing faster than you think and will become more broadly available on shorter timescales than you might have hoped.”

Rose is a founder and CTO of D-Wave. He is a leading advocate for quantum computing and physics-based processor design, and has been invited to speak on these topics in venues ranging from the 2003 TED Conference to the 2013 HPC User Forum.

Rose’s innovative and ambitious approach to building quantum computing technology has received coverage in MIT Technology Review magazine, The Economist, New Scientist, Scientific American, Nature and Science magazines, and one of his business strategies was profiled in a Harvard Business School case study. He has received several awards and accolades for his work with D-Wave, including winning the 2011 Canadian Innovation Exchange Innovator of the Year award.

Dr. Rose holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of British Columbia, specializing in quantum effects in materials. While at McMaster University, he graduated first in his class with a BEng in Engineering Physics, specializing in semiconductor engineering. He also is a two-time Canadian national wrestling champion, the 2010 NAGA Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu world champion, and a member of the McMaster University sports Hall of Fame.



SOURCE  Singularity Weblog

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Winfried Hensinger is a leader in Quantum, Atomic and Optical Physics at the University of Sussex. In the TED video above, he talks about the future of quantum computers and the role the team he is part of has in their development.

eight = 250; //

I
n the paradox of Schrödinger's Cat, a series of cats are placed into deadly rooms (poisoned rooms or explosive rooms), with a 50% chance of a deadly outcome.  Wihout looking in the rooms, the person observing deduces the cat is both potentially alive and dead.  Just so, quantum theory predicts that a cat can be in limbo between being dead and alive.

This Quantum spookiness stunned many scientists – most notably Albert Einstein. Since its creation in the early twentieth century, many experiments have proved the validity of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics also allows teleportation, like in Star Trek, however so far only with individual atoms.

Computers built with quantum technology — a quantum computer — would be much faster than today's computers. For example, a quantum computer would be able to crack the encryption we use to send our credit details over the internet in a matter of hours, where our current super computers would take thousands of years.

Quantum computers would also potentially help us to better understand the world around us. For instance they may help us to understand chemical reactions that would allow us to create new medicines.

Related articles Quantum Computer Wins Head-To-Head Test  Google and NASA Team Up To Explore the Potential of the D-Wave Quantum Computer  First Viable High-Speed Quantum Computer May Be Possible With Connected Quantum Dots

Winfried Hensinger is a leader in Quantum, Atomic and Optical Physics at the University of Sussex. In the TED video above, he talks about the future of quantum computers and the role the team he is part of has in their development.

Hensinger obtained his undergraduate degree at the Ruprechts-Karls University in Heidelberg, Germany and then moved to the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia where he was awarded a Master's in Physics. He continued on and obtained his PhD at the University of Queensland under guidance of Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop, Norman Heckenberg and Gerard Milburn in the field of experimenal nonlinear quantum dynamics with ultracold atoms. 

During his PhD candidature he spent an extended period at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, USA in the group of Nobel laureate William Phillips demonstrating dynamical tunneling in a sodium Bose-Einstein condensate. He obtained a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education (Tertiary Education) at the University of Queensland concurrent with his PhD studies. After completing his PhD he spent three years as a FOCUS Research Fellow in the group of Chris Monroe at the University of Michigan, USA developing ways to scale ion trap quantum information processing, leading into a still ongoing collaboration. He is now a Reader at the University of Sussex.

For a more in-depth discussion of his team's approach to quantum computing, there is also an interview with (a younger-looking) Hensinger available here.



SOURCE  TEDxTalks

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 Quantum Computing

According to Geordie Rose, founder of the Canadian company D-Wave, quantum computing is at the early stages of explosive exponential growth.  D-Wave has the only commercially available quantum platforms and is soon to debut its 512 quibit model.

Traditional computer process information as bits that can be a 0 or a 1. Quantum computers utilize the potential of quantum mechanics by making its bits a 0, a 1, or a 0 and a 1 simultaneously. This “superposition” lets it do many calculations at once, where a traditional computer can only perform one

The most popular approach so far for building a quantum computer is the circuit or gate model, whose processor architecture resembles that of conventional computers.

D-Wave Systems Inc. however, uses the relatively new adiabatic quantum computer model, also known as quantum annealing. This architecture allows its quantum bits, or qubits, to shift from superposition to a traditional computer state.

The company could be on the verge of unleashing vast computing power. Quantum computers handle information in a fundamentally different way than so-called classical computers. A D-Wave processor doubles in power every time its developers add a quantum bit, or qubit, a basic building block that is the equivalent of transistors in classical silicon chips. As it prepares to launch a 512-qubit product before the end of 2012, the company has proven that it can roughly double the number of qubits every year.

Already named Rose's Law for Quantum Computation, after Geordie Rose, D-Wave's founder, the exponential growth of the D-Wave development plan could have enormous potential consequences for AI, medicine, internet search and many other fields.

“A quantum computer is on a completely different scaling curve, where once it passes traditional computers, they can never catch up,” Steve Jurvetson, who sits on D-Wave’s board, recently told the Globe and Mail. “That is just unprecedented in the technology business.”

Click Here for a video of Geordie Rose explaining the power of quantum computing.

According to Rose, artificial intelligence in particular could benefit from quantum computing: "Recently there have been advances in the science of learning that allow us a path to try to actually try to mimic human-type learning in an engineered systems.  And, somewhat fortuitously, the underlying mathematics of those systems can be run on our hardware."

Rose continues, "What we are doing on the application side is trying to understand the power of the state-of-the-art learning techniques when they are running on our systems.  In the service of building complete engineered systems that behave and mimic human intelligence.  Not just intelligence in the sense of being able to do things faster, but mimicking human creativity, judgement and so on.  For the first time in history, I believe that the frameworks for understanding how to do this are in place and our hardware is ideally suited to attacking one of the hard bottleneck problems that underlies this type of approach." 

D-Wave's processor circuitry is made from the metal niobium, which turns into a superconductor at very low temperatures, so the processor is supercooled to just above 0º Kelvin (-273.15° Celsius). The D-Wave processor is housed in a cylindrical refrigerator suspended inside a shielded room, with 16 layers protecting it against everything from radio-frequency noise to magnetic disturbances.

The processor consists of qubits connected by couplers; surrounding them is a programmable magnetic memory.  

To date, D-Wave holds 93 U.S. patents and has 107 patent applications under way globally. Its IP portfolio will make it very difficult for competitors to design a similar machine, at least for 15 years or so, Dr. Rose predicts.

SOURCE  The Globe and Mail

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Scientists at IBM Research have achieved major advances in quantum computing device performance that they say may accelerate the realization of a practical, full-scale quantum computer, with quantum states lasting up to 100 microseconds — a 2 to 4 times improvement over previous results. Thes major advances in device performance that may accelerate the realization of a practical, full-scale quantum computer. For specific applications, quantum computing, which exploits the underlying quantum mechanical behavior of matter, has the potential to deliver computational power that is unrivaled by any supercomputer today.

The scientists have established three new records for reducing errors in elementary computations and retaining the integrity of quantum mechanical properties in quantum bits (qubits) — the basic units that carry information within quantum computing.

IBM has employed superconducting qubits, which use established microfabrication techniques developed for silicon technology, providing the potential to one day scale up to and manufacture thousands or millions of qubits.

IBM researchers will be presenting their latest results at the annual American Physical Society meeting taking place February 27-March 2, 2012 in Boston.
The Possibilities of Quantum Computing

The special properties of qubits will allow quantum computers to work on millions of computations at once, while desktop PCs can typically handle minimal simultaneous computations. For example, a single 250-qubit state contains more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe.

These properties will have widespread implications foremost for the field of data encryption where quantum computers could factor very large numbers like those used to decode and encode sensitive information. Other potential applications for quantum computing may include searching databases of unstructured information, performing a range of optimization tasks and solving previously unsolvable mathematical problems.

Quantum states up to 100 microseconds

One of the great challenges for scientists seeking to harness the power of quantum computing is controlling or removing quantum decoherence — the creation of errors in calculations caused by interference from factors such as heat, electromagnetic radiation, and materials defects. To deal with this problem, scientists have been experimenting for years to discover ways of reducing the number of errors and of lengthening the time periods over which the qubits retain their quantum mechanical properties. When this time is sufficiently long, error correction schemes become effective making it possible to perform long and complex calculations.

IBM has recently been experimenting with a unique “three dimensional” superconducting qubit (3D qubit), an approach that was initiated at Yale University. Among the results, the IBM team has used a 3D qubit to extend the amount of time that the qubits retain their quantum states up to 100 microseconds — a 2 to 4 times improvement over previously reported records. This value reaches just past the minimum threshold to enable effective error correction schemes and suggests that scientists can begin to focus on broader engineering aspects for scalability.

In separate experiments, the group at IBM also demonstrated a more traditional “two-dimensional” qubit (2D qubit) device and implemented a two-qubit logic operation — a controlled-NOT (CNOT) operation, which is a fundamental building block of a larger quantum computing system. Their operation showed a 95 percent success rate, enabled in part due to the long coherence time of nearly 10 microseconds. These numbers are on the cusp of effective error correction schemes and greatly facilitate future multi-qubit experiments.

Quantum computing progress

“The superconducting qubit research led by the IBM team has been progressing in a very focused way on the road to a reliable, scalable quantum computer. The device performance that they have now reported brings them nearly to the tipping point; we can now see the building blocks that will be used to prove that error correction can be effective, and that reliable logical qubits can be realized,” observes David DiVincenzo, professor at the Institute of Quantum Information, Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Juelich.

Based on this progress, optimism about superconducting qubits and the possibilities for a future quantum computer are rapidly growing. While most of the work in the field to date has focused on improvements in device performance, efforts in the community now must now include systems integration aspects, such as assessing the classical information processing demands for error correction, I/O issues, feasibility, and costs with scaling.

IBM envisions a practical quantum computing system as including a classical system intimately connected to the quantum computing hardware. Expertise in communications and packaging technology will be essential at and beyond the level presently practiced in the development of today’s most sophisticated digital computers.

IBM Press Release