Ok. This was one of “those weeks” when everything happens at once. And clearly IBM has taken the spotlight with their publication on quantum usefulness. Basically IBM and UC Berkeley have demonstrated how to use 127 qubits (the eagle processor) to simulate a physical system and applying error mitigation in a way they observe better accuracy than the results from a super computer. But there are two things to consider here: 1) This is not a problem with real applicability except in some niche physics areas, and 2) What this demonstrates, much like the boson sampling cases from a few years ago, is that there are algorithm possibilities for future quantum usefulness (which is great!). Specifically in this case by applying error mitigation.At the same time, we see advances on simulating the boson sampling problem with tensor networks. So of course new classical methods can overthrown this research anytime.Intel has released their silicon spin device with 12 Qubits. This may not seem a lot but it is a very promising tech. So don’t get fooled by the size of the device. Meanwhile, some people raise concerns about the energy footprint of superconducting qubits, while a new tech for cooling is proposed (inmersing the qubit in liquid Helium). All this works hand in hand with a new research for PsiQuantum, reducing the computational requirements to break today’s cryptographic systems (elliptic curve based). But don’t worry, we still need A LOT of physical qubits. And while the Y2Q arrives, vendors are speeding up. AWS just released their Quantum Safe FTP service, so most of us will not need to do anything specific to be “Shor-Protected”. A very interesting piece has been published on DW showcasing Chinese research and how it is tied to Germany funding Pan-Jian Wei’s research. In the meantime in Europe a group of researchers from Universities of Innsbruck in Austria and Paris-Saclay in France have been able to put together a quantum repeater that achieved 50km and demonstrated that 17 ion-based repeater nodes could establish entanglement between ions 800 kilometres apart.
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The Week in Quantum Computing - June 19th
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Ok. This was one of “those weeks” when everything happens at once. And clearly IBM has taken the spotlight with their publication on quantum usefulness. Basically IBM and UC Berkeley have demonstrated how to use 127 qubits (the eagle processor) to simulate a physical system and applying error mitigation in a way they observe better accuracy than the results from a super computer. But there are two things to consider here: 1) This is not a problem with real applicability except in some niche physics areas, and 2) What this demonstrates, much like the boson sampling cases from a few years ago, is that there are algorithm possibilities for future quantum usefulness (which is great!). Specifically in this case by applying error mitigation.At the same time, we see advances on simulating the boson sampling problem with tensor networks. So of course new classical methods can overthrown this research anytime.Intel has released their silicon spin device with 12 Qubits. This may not seem a lot but it is a very promising tech. So don’t get fooled by the size of the device. Meanwhile, some people raise concerns about the energy footprint of superconducting qubits, while a new tech for cooling is proposed (inmersing the qubit in liquid Helium). All this works hand in hand with a new research for PsiQuantum, reducing the computational requirements to break today’s cryptographic systems (elliptic curve based). But don’t worry, we still need A LOT of physical qubits. And while the Y2Q arrives, vendors are speeding up. AWS just released their Quantum Safe FTP service, so most of us will not need to do anything specific to be “Shor-Protected”. A very interesting piece has been published on DW showcasing Chinese research and how it is tied to Germany funding Pan-Jian Wei’s research. In the meantime in Europe a group of researchers from Universities of Innsbruck in Austria and Paris-Saclay in France have been able to put together a quantum repeater that achieved 50km and demonstrated that 17 ion-based repeater nodes could establish entanglement between ions 800 kilometres apart.