Quantum Computing Report by GQI - Week 49, 2023

Oxford Quantum Circuits Receives a $100 Million Series B Investment and Announces Its 32-Qubit Toshiko Platform

Oxford Quantum Circuits is a quantum processor manufacturer using superconducting technology and formed in 2017 and based in the UK. The $100 million Series B investment was led by SBI Investment with additional participation from previous investors?Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE), University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC), Lansdowne Partners, and OTIF, acted by manager Oxford Investment Consultants (OIC). It is the largest Series B investment so far achieved in the UK for a quantum company. Previously, they had raised ?￡41 million ($51.8M USD) in 2022 in a Series A funding which was also the largest Series A funding for a quantum company in the UK.

The company has also announced that the Toshiko processor is now available in private beta. It is an upgradable design that currently supports 32 qubits. It is intended for deployment at commercial data centers where it can be integrated with the classical HPC resources for a hybrid compute environment. The company has adopted a Digital Fabric Interconnect, to enable secure, hybrid compute for customers.?This type of installation is attractive to customers concerned about security who would rather not send their data to external cloud providers. The processor can be programmed with QIR (Quantum Intermediate Representation), OpenPulse and OpenQASM programming languages.

Additional details about the Toshiko release and the Series B investment are available in a press release available here . Additional information about the Toshiko processor can be found on a web page here and a technical product sheet here .

QuantumDiamonds Raises €7 Million ($7.6M USD) in Seed Funding for Development of Quantum Sensors

QuantumDiamonds is a Munich, Germany based company formed in 2022 by graduates of the Technical University of Munich. The first €3 million of the funding was led by funding led by IQ Capital and Earlybird with additional participation from Onsight Ventures , First Momentum , Creator Fund , UnternehmerTUM , and various angel investors from the semiconductor industry. In addition, the company received €3 million in grant funding from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator and the Bavarian state to bring the total to €7 million. The company develops atom-sized quantum sensors for non-destructive, nano-scale imaging of magnetic fields based upon nitrogen-vacancy (NV) diamond technology. These types of sensors can be useful for semiconductor manufacturing, medical diagnostic applications, and other applications. The company indicates that four of the world’s top 10 semiconductor manufacturers are testing their devices. They will be using the funds to hire more quantum engineers and to take the product form the current prototype status to commercial production. Additional information about the funding can be seen on the Tech.eu website here .

QSimulate Receives $2.5 Million in a New Funding Round

Quantum Simulation Technologies, Inc. (QSimulate) has secured $2.5M in funding from 2xN, UTokyo IPC, and Kyoto iCAP. The investment will bolster QSimulate’s business, which focuses on its quantum physics-based drug-discovery platform, QSP Life. This platform includes QUELO, QuValent, and QuantumFP, which cover various aspects of drug design.

QSimulate employs proprietary quantum physics-based algorithms to predict solutions to large-scale biological problems. Its technology has facilitated the first quantitative application of quantum mechanics to drug design, offering predictions with unparalleled accuracy. This has paved the way for the computational study of new therapeutic classes.

In partnership with Google Quantum AI, QSimulate has contributed to the development of fault-tolerant quantum computing algorithms for chemical, material, and biomolecular problems (see a blog about this work here ). This collaboration has laid the groundwork for future algorithm design in the quantum realm, supported by existing QSimulate technologies. The company is also working with JSR Corporation in Japan.

QSimulate’s strategic advancements have positioned the company for the digital discovery era. By integrating physics-based AI, QSimulate’s learning models can distinguish between accurate AI predictions and AI errors in molecular design.

A news release provided by QSimulate announcing the new investment can be accessed here .

PASQAL to Receive a $15 Million CAD ($11M USD) Loan to Establish Its Canadian Subsidiary in DistriQ, a Quantum Innovation Zone in Quebec

PASQAL , a quantum computing company, has announced a $90 million initiative over five years in Sherbrooke, Quebec. The project aims to manufacture and commercialize quantum computers, and conduct research and development in collaboration with academic and industrial partners within DistriQ, a quantum innovation zone. The goal is to establish Sherbrooke as a globally recognized quantum hub. The Government of Quebec is supporting this investment project with a $15 million CAD ($11M USD) loan for the establishment of PASQAL SAS’ subsidiary in DistriQ . The project is expected to create 53 permanent jobs over five years.

The Premier of Quebec, Fran?ois Legault, officially announced the opening of Espace Quantique 1, a new era for quantum computing, on November 24. PASQAL will play a key role in this initiative, not only as a major partner of DistriQ within Espace Quantique 1, but also in the production, development of technological laboratories, training, and funding for new ventures in the quantum field.

PASQAL’s presence in Sherbrooke represents a significant step in the evolution of quantum computing. The company aims to actively participate in the creation of a dynamic ecosystem that will serve as a catalyst for innovation in the quantum industry, attracting talent and companies from all over the world.

In 2024, PASQAL will open a facility at the heart of DistriQ, within Espace Quantique 1, aimed at manufacturing neutral atom quantum computers and the next generation of machines. Quantum Space 1 will also provide a collaborative space of nearly 5,000 square meters dedicated to quantum innovation. It will be utilized by PASQAL as an R&D center, for prototype testing, and for business activities in Canada.

DistriQ also focuses on training talent. PASQAL announced a contribution of $500,000 to the creation of a research chair within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Sherbrooke, which will also benefit from federal and/or local grants.

Quantonation, and the Quebec fund Quantacet will collaborate to fund QV Studio, that will support the transition to commercial quantum applications, creating a unique ecosystem within DistriQ for sector startups. This fund aims to invest in around fifteen Quebec-based or foreign companies, especially at the pre-seed or seed stage, that are active within the DistriQ innovation zone. It will foster the development of a strong and international quantum ecosystem.

A press release provided by Pasqal has been posted on their web site here .

Zapata, Rigetti, and Others Win Phase II Awards for DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Program

In April 2021, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a Quantum Benchmarking program to estimate the long-term utility of quantum computers by creating new benchmarks that can quantify progress towards specific computational challenges. Additionally, the program will estimate the hardware-specific resources required to achieve different levels of benchmark performance. We had previously reported (see here and here ) on several Phase I awards that were made last year.

DARPA has now started providing awards for Phase II of the program for certain teams to continue work on this project. Rigetti Computing , along with a team including the University of Technology Sydney, Aalto University, and the University of Southern California will continue with their benchmarking activities through the end of Phase II which will last until March 2025. During Phase I this team developed a resource estimation framework that can help estimate the required capability of a large superconducting based quantum processor for solving large, complex problems. Phase II will involve refining and optimizing the estimates for selected utility-scale problems. It will focus on fault tolerant applications in areas such as chemistry simulations and modeling quantum system dynamics. The Phase II award is valued at up to $1.5 million dependent upon the achievement of certain milestones. Rigetti has provided a news release announcing the award and it can be accessed here .

A second announcement has been made by Zapata AI along with partners from Aalto University, IonQ , the University of Technology Sydney (Australia), and the University of Texas at Dallas. This will also continue their Phase I work which developed an open source benchmarking tool called BenchQ . This tool can make estimates of the hardware resources required for fault-tolerant quantum computation in an ion-trap based processor. BenchQ includes a graph-state compiler, distillation factory models, decoder performance models, implementations of selected quantum algorithms, and more. The Phase II work will including improving the tool to make it easier for others to adopt, building and maintaining software integrations, and adding additional use cases. Zapata has posted a news release announcing this Phase II award on their web site that can be seen here .

DARPA has made additional awards for this Quantum Benchmarking program that will be announced shortly. We will report on those awards when the information is available.

Q-CTRL Error Suppression Technology Integrated into IBM Quantum’s Pay-As-You-Go Plan

Q-CTRL and IBM have announced that Q-CTRLs error suppression technology, named Q-CTRL Embedded, has been integrated into the IBM Qiskit runtime system. This feature is currently only available for users on the Pay-As-You-Go plan. There is no additional cost for those users who utilize this capability. This is the first time that IBM has integrated third party software into their system in this manner. The software can be invoked with a single line of code. This software can provide users with a significant improvement in the quality of the calculated results versus a run using standard settings. The chart below shows a comparison of a hardware algorithm run with the Q-CTRL software versus one without. It provides for a 1000X improvement in success probability.

It is important to note that Q-CTRL’s software performs Error Suppression and it requires no additional overhead involving multiple shots in order to do its work. IBM has developed several Error Mitigation algorithms including Zero Noise Extrapolation (ZNE) and Probabilistic Error Cancellation (PEC) which work by performing multiple shots of an program and using a classical computer to analyze the final result to reduce the errors. The approaches are not mutually exclusive and can be used together.

Q-CTRL has posted a press release on its web site announcing the available of Q-CTRL Embedded which can be seen here . Also, a technical paper is available on the Physical Applied Review web site and can be found here .

Alice & Bob Partners with OVHcloud to Launch Felis, an Emulator for Logical Qubits

Alice & Bob , a hardware developer in quantum computing, has partnered with OVHcloud to launch Felis, the first quantum emulator capable of predicting the behavior of logical qubits. Available through the OVHcloud Public Cloud universe, Felis allows users to tune error rates and abstracts error correction, simplifying quantum algorithm testing.

Felis is a significant addition to OVHcloud’s quantum emulators and a step forward for the French quantum industry. It enables algorithm developers to experiment with high-quality qubits, accelerating the path to industrially relevant applications. This is the first time an emulator is capable of anticipating the behavior of logical qubits with tunable error rates and abstracting error correction to simplify quantum algorithm test beds.

Felis focuses on two use cases: the creation of logical qubits from physical ‘cat’ qubits, and the potential applications of logical qubits. Researchers can explore quantum error correction techniques using cat qubits to improve error rates. They can also use the emulator to examine what can be done with high-quality qubits.

Théau Peronnin, CEO of Alice & Bob, stated that logical qubits are the solution to quantum computing’s struggle with errors. The partnership with OVHcloud will show a compelling path to a fault-tolerant quantum computer, benefiting researchers designing algorithms for industry problems.

AWS Announces Braket Direct for Reserving Dedicated Time on a Quantum Processor

One of the frustrations users sometimes have in using quantum computers on the cloud can be the long job queues and the delays a user may see from the time they submit a job to when the job is finally run and the results returned. This can certainly impact productivity. To help solve this issue, AWS has introduced a Braket Direct program that allows a user to reserve a dedicated time. You can reserve time in 1 hour increments but you will pay for all the time you reserve, even if the machine is idle for portions of the period. Braket Direct is now available for the IonQ Aria, QuEra Aquila, and Rigetti Aspen-M-3 processors. Also, the IonQ Forte 30 qubit machine will only be available through Braket Direct. Besides the reservation, AWS will offer free consulting in a 30 minute reservation prep session from one of their experts to enable users to get the most from their reservation. Also 30 minute Office Hours slot to provide advice to users is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Additional details about Braket Direct are available in a blog post located on the AWS web site here .

ParTec AG and Quantum Machines Add to their Collaboration on Quantum Technology

ParTec AG , a leader in modular supercomputers, and Quantum Machines , a provider of quantum control solutions, announced plans to intensify their collaboration. They aim to develop products that combine Quantum Machines’s Quantum Orchestration Platform with ParTec’s proprietary IP. By 2024, ParTec will offer a comprehensive qubit-agnostic solution with Quantum Machines’s technology embedded within. This solution will allow customers to acquire various quantum processing unit (QPU) technologies from different manufacturers and integrate them into a uniform system architecture tailored to their specific needs.

Earlier this year, the two companies unveiled QBridge, a foundation for seamlessly integrating high-performance and quantum computers. QBridge provides a secure and efficient environment for large HPC centers, cloud providers, and research groups seeking to integrate quantum computers into their existing infrastructure. Enhanced with ParTec’s ParaStation Modulo software suite, QBridge facilitates modular computing capacity between classical high-performance computing resources and quantum computing resources. QBridge is currently being tested at the Israeli Quantum Computing Centre, with plans for general availability by the end of 2023.

Bernhard Frohwitter, CEO of ParTec AG, stated that ParTec’s expertise in developing modular supercomputers and quantum computers aligns perfectly with Quantum Machines’ technology. This allows for the execution of advanced quantum algorithms on a wide range of quantum computers and their seamless integration into HPCs. The collaboration between ParTec and Quantum Machines signifies a significant step forward in the field of quantum computing.

Additional information is available in a press release posted on the Quantum Machines website here . Also, you can view our previous article about these company’s collaboration on QBridge here and another article describing ParTec’s plan to build a quantum computer production facility in the Munich area here .

Lessons from the Alibaba Quantum Shut Down

You may have heard that Alibaba has decided to shut down their quantum research team. As reported in this article published by Reuters, about 30 people from the quantum team will be let go and Alibaba will be donating the lab and related equipment to Zhejiang University. It is likely that many of those 30 people will also move to the university. Alibaba has faced financial issues recently and has been undergoing several reorganizations. Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu is conducting strategic reviews to distinguish between core and non-core businesses and it appears that quantum technology did not make the cut.

We do not think that this Alibaba shutdown will be the last one to occur. We track 100’s of software and hardware quantum startups and see many efforts that appear redundant. On the software side we see a trend of quantum software companies initiating “quantum-inspired” projects. As one CEO remarked, “end customers don’t really care how a problem gets solved as long as it just does get solved”. So approaches that can take advantage of innovative classical technology, like GPUs, look attractive for those CEOs looking to achieve some near term revenue. As the quantum hardware gets more capable, its possible some of “quantum-inspired” approaches in the future will be able to migrate to true quantum based solutions, but we will have to see.

On the hardware side, it might not be so easy to switch to something classical. We expect to see an industry consolidation over the next few years as some companies find out that they can’t keep up with ever increasing advances being made by their competitors. Some of those companies will be acquired for their technology, some may be acquired for their employees (sometimes called an aqui-hire ), and some companies may shut down altogether.

Like we saw with Alibaba, these events could be precipitated by a external financial event, such as a major recession. The advice we would give to any organizations working on quantum is not to base your business plan on the hope that these external events won’t happen. They probably will occur and will cause a temporary hiccup in funding opportunities or customer adoption rates. But the best companies will find a way through these temporary difficulties and move on to thrive.

Companies need to think about what their differential advantage will be. Many companies we see are betting that they will build a “better mousetrap”. That their technology choice is the best and will surpass any of the current leaders. But not all will succeed. A few companies are pursuing a strategy of targeting different markets or different business models than the others. Companies need to have a good understanding on what are their customer’s needs, what their competitors are doing, and what are the unique strengths within their own company. Some of this understanding they can gain on their own, but it is also helpful to work with external sources, like GQI, that can provide a broader and unbiased view of the state of the whole industry. With this knowledge they can thoughtfully plan a corporate strategy that provides value for their customers, differentiates their company, and achieves ultimate success.

Those who just assume that quantum technology is so revolutionary that it will create a rising tide that will lift all boats, may just find themselves eventually ending up at the bottom of the sea.

Research Roundup for November 2023

By Dr Chris Mansell, Senior Scientific Writer at Terra Quantum

Shown below are summaries of a few interesting research papers in quantum technology that we have seen over the past month.

Hardware

Title: Electron charge qubit with 0.1 millisecond coherence time Organizations: Argonne National Laboratory; University of Chicago; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; The NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Northeastern University; Stanford University; University of Notre Dame Electron charge qubits on solid neon are not as well known as some of the other quantum computing hardware platforms, but they soon could be. The authors of this paper have increased the relaxation time of the qubits by a factor of 10 and their coherence time by a factor of 1000. They also achieved a readout fidelity of 97.5% and a one-qubit gate fidelity of 99.95%. These metrics are extremely impressive by the standards of any type of quantum processor. Of course, to properly establish solid neon as one of the leading systems, two-qubit gates will have to be demonstrated. Indeed, the paper includes experimental results demonstrating the strong coupling of qubits with the same resonator, which is a good first step in this direction. Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-023-02247-5 ?

Title: Hotter is Easier: Unexpected Temperature Dependence of Spin Qubit Frequencies Organizations: Delft University of Technology; Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research Semiconductor spin qubits are subject to a poorly understood effect whereby microwaves cause the spin Lamor frequency to transiently shift. This degrades the fidelity of microwave-driven operations, such as resonant Rabi oscillations. The existing methods to mitigate this effect all have considerable drawbacks, so gaining a better understanding of the phenomenon would improve the prospects of employing these qubits in a scalable quantum processor. In this paper, careful experiments were performed over a range of qubit temperatures. These provided some insights into the underlying microscopic mechanisms that might be at play. Most notably, the frequency shift was smaller at higher temperatures. This is a nice result because it eases the cooling requirements for the qubits. Link: https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.13.041015 ?

Title: An integrated atom array — nanophotonic chip platform with background-free imaging Organizations: University of Chicago; Argonne National Laboratory Most of the equipment in a cold atom lab is big and bulky, which works well for trying out new ideas. However, it is not great for reliability. Making the set-up a lot more compact has been an important goal of the field for decades. In this paper, impressive feats were performed on a millimetre-scale silicon nitride on silicon chip. Single caesium atoms were loaded into a defect-free, 8-by-8 array of optical tweezers. They were imaged with a new, high-fidelity, background-free detection scheme. The chip consisted of nanophotonic cavities embedded in waveguides that took up only 1% of the chip’s surface. This presents an opportunity to integrate many other components directly onto the chip. Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02153 ?

Title: Quantum error mitigation in quantum annealing Organizations: D-Wave Systems; Simon Fraser University; The University of British Columbia A beautiful aspect of the quantum technology field is that extremely diverse systems and methods are unified by both quantum theory and information theory. This means that tools and techniques developed in one scenario can be adapted to many others. In this instance, quantum error mitigation protocols devised for the circuit model of quantum computation have been repurposed for quantum annealing. Zero-Noise Extrapolation, implemented on a prototype D-wave Advantage2 processor with 232 superconducting qubits, effectively extended the coherent annealing time by almost an order of magnitude. To put this in perspective, in the past two decades, the coherence time of state-of-the-art superconducting qubits has been improving at a rate of approximately one order of magnitude every four years.? Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01306 ?

Title: Benchmarking Quantum Processor Performance at Scale Organization: IBM Quantum volume is one of the most popular measures of quantum processor performance. It has several nice features, including putting an equal emphasis on circuit width and circuit depth. However, it also has some drawbacks, so this paper introduces a complementary measure called layer fidelity. Its aim is to provide insights into the ability of a processor to run rectangular circuits (e.g., ones where the width is greater than the depth), especially those where the logic gates are organised into layered patterns. The layer fidelity was determined for two IBM devices: the 127-qubit Eagle processor and the 133-qubit Heron processor. The latter had a better “error per layered gate” value because the coupling between its adjacent qubits could be switched on and off as required. Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.05933 ?

Software

Title: Absence of barren plateaus in finite local-depth circuits with long-range entanglement Organizations: Tsinghua University; Tencent Quantum Laboratory Quantum circuits are often designed to depend upon numerical parameters that can be iteratively updated in order to minimise the value of a loss function. Unfortunately, so-called barren plateaus can appear in the loss landscape of deep circuits, making it extremely challenging to decide how to update the parameters. This has been observed to occur when the circuit expressivity is too high, when the initial quantum states are too entangled, when every qubit in the circuit is measured, and when there is too much noise. In this preprint, a distinction is made between the depth of the entire circuit and the local depth, which is the number of non-commuting gates acting on a given qubit. The researchers find that keeping the local depth constant prevents barren plateaus, even when the overall circuit is deep.? Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01393 ?

Title: Hacking Cryptographic Protocols with Advanced Variational Quantum Attacks? Organizations: Multiverse Computing; University of Navarra; Donostia International Physics Center; Ikerbasque Foundation for Science Cryptanalysis is the breaking of encryption protocols. As illustrated by Shor’s and Grover’s algorithms, it is an arena in which quantum algorithms can shine. Last year, a variational quantum algorithm was found to be surprisingly good at attacking symmetric cryptography. In a new paper, the algorithm has been made more resource-efficient, now requiring fewer qubits and a shallower circuit. When tested, it cracked the Blowfish encryption protocol with 24 times fewer attempts than a classical brute-force approach. This is an intriguing sign because there aren’t any known classical algorithms that can do better than brute force. In a field as important as this one, when a heuristic method just seems to work, it is certainly worth investigating further.? Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02986 ?

Title: On the Pauli Spectrum of QAC0 Organizations: Columbia University; UC Berkeley Analysing the Fourier spectra of Boolean functions has produced important results in theoretical computer science. In this preprint on quantum computation, the authors wondered if considering the Pauli spectrum of a many-qubit operator could be equally productive. Instead of looking directly at unitary operations, they distinguished their work from prior approaches by considering quantum channels. This enabled them to prove some new results related to average-case circuit lower bounds and sample-efficient learning algorithms. Overall, their novel way of analysing Pauli spectra seems to allow natural connections to be made to computational complexity.? Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09631 ?

Title: Multi-client distributed blind quantum computation with the Qline architecture Organizations: Sapienza Università di Roma; Sorbonne Université; VeriQloud; University of Edinburgh; National Quantum Computing Centre Blind quantum computation (BQC) is a form of secure delegated computation in which a server can run an algorithm for a client without obtaining any information about its input or output. Remarkably, even the algorithm itself can remain hidden from the server. Recently, classical protocols, such as federated machine learning, that involve multiple clients have been gaining prominence. In this paper, an architecture for multi-client, universal BQC was proposed. The clients do not need to possess a great deal of quantum technology, only the ability to perform single-qubit rotations. Due to these fairly simple requirements, the scheme is relatively practical as well as secure.? Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43617-0 ?

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