Quantum News Briefs January 9: How businesses can get quantum ready for long-term success; MIT’s New quantum computing architecture could be used to connect large-scale devices; Scaling and diversifying the talent pipeline will accelerate quantum opportunities + MORE.
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How businesses can get quantum ready for long-term success
His suggestions for getting quantum ready are itemized below.
A high-level quantum ready framework may include the following steps:
Learn and reach out: Get a high-level view of where quantum is, and where it is going. Start to establish both your internal champions and engage with quantum companies to find thought partners that are right for you.
Map your computational impact landscape: For many, the journey involves gaining an understanding of your current computational challenges. What does your problem landscape look like? Plot your computational challenges against “impact on the organization” and “computational difficulty”. Are there any high value, yet computationally intractable challenges facing your company? These problems might be suitable for quantum computers. Collaborate with quantum experts to map this to quantum computing capabilities. Consider reaching out to quantum computing companies to learn more about what’s possible, but also to help with this mapping exercise.
Build skills: Build an internal capability in quantum that is appropriate for the business’s opportunity in this area. Or rent time on today’s small-scale machines to start solving toy problems and getting to grips with how these machines work.
Be patient: Commit to the longevity of the development of quantum computers and reap the rewards as quantum computers become more powerful.
In summary, Elsen explains “Once this initial exploration phase is complete, then the truly interesting conversations around quantum computing can start.” Click here to read Venture Beat article in-entirety.
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New quantum computing architecture could be used to connect large-scale devices
In work published in Nature Physics, MIT researchers demonstrate step one, the deterministic emission of single photons—information carriers—in a user-specified direction. Their method ensures quantum information flows in the correct direction more than 96 percent of the time.
Linking several of these modules enables a larger network of quantum processors that are interconnected with one another, no matter their physical separation on a computer chip.
“Quantum interconnects are a crucial step toward modular implementations of larger-scale machines built from smaller individual components,” says Bharath Kannan Ph.D. ’22, co-lead author of a research paper describing this technique.
“The ability to communicate between smaller subsystems will enable a modular architecture for quantum processors, and this may be a simpler way of scaling to larger system sizes compared to the brute-force approach of using a single large and complicated chip,” Kannan adds.
The researchers found that their technique achieved more than 96 percent fidelity—this means that if they intended to emit a photon to the right, 96 percent of the time it went to the right.
Now that they have used this technique to effectively emit photons in a specific direction, the researchers want to connect multiple modules and use the process to emit and absorb photons. This would be a major step toward the development of a modular architecture that combines many smaller-scale processors into one larger-scale, and more powerful, quantum processor. Click here to read the Phys.org article in-entirety.
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Scaling and diversifying the talent pipeline will accelerate quantum opportunities
Woods explains that quantum technology companies going to need ready access to a skilled and diverse quantum workforce of “all the talents”. A case study in this regard is Oxford Instruments NanoScience, a division of parent group Oxford Instruments, the long-established UK provider of specialist technologies and services to research and industry.
The quantum ecosystem is already brimming with opportunity for ambitious early-career scientists and innovators. Alongside established technology providers like Oxford Instruments NanoScience and our peers, there’s a growing wave of technology start-ups.
At the applications sharp-end, we’re seeing companies like IBM offer cloud-based quantum computing services, while financial powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg build dedicated quantum groups to address high-performance computing problems in quantitative finance. The bottom line: there’s a broad-scope requirement for quantum companies to recruit across the core physical sciences and engineering disciplines.
Woods emphasizes, “It’s the path from academic research into industry that we need to scale and encourage near term, shifting the centre of gravity for quantum towards industry and technology innovation.” He says, “We’re seeing encouraging efforts to coordinate activities between national initiatives like UK Quantum, the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) in the US, and Japan’s Quantum STrategic industry Alliance for Revolution (Q-STAR). The goal: to enhance the visibility of the quantum industry and associated commercial and career opportunities – not just regionally, but globally.” Click here to read entire, informative interview in January 6 PhysicsWorld.
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New type of entanglement lets scientists ‘See’ inside nuclei
“This technique is similar to the way doctors use positron emission tomography (PET scans) to see what’s happening inside the brain and other body parts,” said former Brookhaven Lab physicist James Daniel Brandenburg, a member of the STAR collaboration who joined The Ohio State University as an assistant professor in January 2023. “But in this case, we’re talking about mapping out features on the scale of femtometers—quadrillionths of a meter—the size of an individual proton.”
Even more amazing, the STAR physicists say, is the observation of an entirely new kind of quantum interference that makes their measurements possible
That discovery may have applications well beyond the lofty goal of mapping out the building blocks of matter. One goal is to create significantly more powerful communication tools and computers than exist today. But most other observations of entanglement to date, including a recent demonstration of interference of lasers with different wavelengths, have been between photons or identical electrons.
“This is the first-ever experimental observation of entanglement between dissimilar particles,” Brandenburg said. Click here to read the Brookhaven announcement on HPCWire.
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Sandra K. Helsel, Ph.D. has been researching and reporting on frontier technologies since 1990. She has her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.