Last November, the Biden administration discussed with US quantum computer makers, including Google and IBM, the administration’s plan to develop quantum computing export controls against China. Scott Aaronson, Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-inventor of boson sampling, said in his blog that he does not think boson sampling will become a form of universal quantum computing. He said Jiuzhang was built only to “demonstrate quantum supremacy and refute Gil Kalai,” whose team at Google created Sycamore. China relies on Pan’s team at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei to develop its photonic quantum computers.

This leap from dual to multivariate processing exponentially boosts computing power. Complex problems that currently take the most powerful supercomputer several years could potentially be solved in seconds. Future quantum computers could open hitherto unfathomable frontiers in mathematics and science, helping to solve existential challenges like climate change and food security. A flurry of recent breakthroughs and government investment means we now sit on the cusp of a quantum revolution.

Current research looks into applying quantum algorithms  to optimize the planning and scheduling of mission operations, machine learning for Earth science data, and simulations for the design of new materials for use in aeronautics and space exploration. Quantum mechanics describes effects such as superposition, where a particle can be in many different states at once. Quantum entanglement allows particles to be correlated with each other in unique ways that can be utilized by quantum computing. Though why these properties and more occur is still a mystery of science, the way in which they function has been well characterized and researched, allowing quantum computing experts to design hardware and algorithms to use these properties to their advantage. With quantum annealing today, these real-world optimization problems are solved in hybrid fashion—that is, they combine classical and quantum computing capabilities.

Quantum-safe encryption

Scientists in the Netherlands, for example, entangled three one-qubit devices that successfully communicated and stored information in a theoretically unhackable manner. At scale, this architecture, which uses quantum cryptography, could usher in a super-secure communications infrastructure that shields internet-connected devices, including critical infrastructure, from cyberattacks. Some small, error-prone quantum computers are available, but further development may require collaboration, supply chain and workforce development, and billions of dollars in investments. As well as speed, another advantage quantum computers have over traditional computers is size. According to Moore’s Law, computing power doubles roughly every two years, according to the journal IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.

A measurement will destroy this superposition, and only then can it be said that it is in the lower or upper state. Error mitigation, the IBM scientists believe, is an interim solution that can be used now for increasingly complex problems beyond the Ising model. On the quantum computer, the calculation took less than a thousandth of a second to complete. Each quantum calculation was unreliable — fluctuations of quantum noise inevitably intrude and induce errors — but each calculation was quick, so it could be performed repeatedly. This problem is too complex for a precise answer to be calculated even on the largest, fastest supercomputers. While researchers at Google in 2019 claimed that they had achieved “quantum supremacy” — a task performed much more quickly on a quantum computer than a conventional one — IBM’s researchers say they have achieved something new and more useful, albeit more modestly named.

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Author Bio
Christine Baissac-Hayden is a writer and translator with a deep understanding of international communication dynamics. In her role as SC23 Communications Chair, she brings together technology specialists and emerging trends to help facilitate industry innovation. To understand the difference, we can contrast Earth (which is orbiting around the Sun) and an electron (which is rotating around the nucleus of an atom).

And, for smaller algorithms, the company says it’ll simply run multiple instances in parallel to boost the chance of returning the right answer. While several businesses have created personal quantum computers (albeit at a high cost), there is yet nothing commercially available. JPMorgan Chase and Visa are both investigating quantum computing and related technology. Google may offer a cloud-based quantum computing service after it has been built.

The Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum – bringing together four leading regulators in the UK – published its “Quantum Technologies Insights Paper” earlier this year (June 2023). The paper considers the potential of Quantum computing and the issues that need to be considered now – as in now – to prepare the world for this next big chapter in computing technology. These achievements stem from Beijing’s emphasis on quantum computing research. China is reportedly investing $10 billion in the field, and says it increased national R&D spending by 7 percent last year. By contrast, the U.S. government devoted $1.2 billion to quantum computing research in 2018 under a new national strategy.

The future is happening now

In an experiment by Rainer Blatt’s group at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, this has been successfully performed for up to fourteen ions. The next step is to scale the technology up to a bigger number of trapped ions. An ion trap is a system consisting of electric and magnetic fields, which can capture ions and keep them at locations.

Using an ion trap, one can arrange several ions in a line, at regular intervals. Bohr himself said, “Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.” Albert Einstein believed that quantum mechanics should not be correct. And, even today, popular lectures on quantum mechanics often emphasize the strangeness of quantum mechanics as one of the main points.

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Atom Computing was founded five years ago by Benjamin Bloom, who has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Colorado, and Jonathan King, who has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. After obtaining seed funding of $5 million, Bloom and King built the world’s first nuclear-spin qubit quantum computer created from optically trapped neutral atoms. Atom Computer’s first prototype, called Phoenix, used a 10×10 array of strontium-87 atoms to create 100 qubits. Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline.

Quantum computing companies are popping up all over the world, but experts estimate that it could take years before quantum computing delivers practical benefits. Google’s machine – called the Sycamore processor – has currently got 70 qubits all lined up and connected. In 2019, the researchers had claimed they’d reached ‘quantum supremacy.’ More recently, they went more specific – suggesting that a top-level supercomputer would take 47 years to do the calculations that Sycamore managed to do in seconds.

IBM wants to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computer

The course begins with an exploration of classes of computational problems that classical computers are not well-suited to solve. We then progress to an intuitive introduction to key QIS concepts that underlie quantum computing. Next, we introduce individual quantum operations, but with a symbolic representation and mathematical representation. A limited set of linear algebra operations will be taught so that students can calculate operation results. Finally, we string these individual operations together to create the first algorithm that illustrates the performance advantage resulting from these unique operations. An important criticism of these active error correction schemes,
however, is that they are devised for a very unrealistic noise model
which treats the computer as quantum and the environment as classical
(Alicki, Lidar, and Zinardi 2006).