The Week in Quantum Computing - October 7th 2024 - HSBC, Quantinuum, Q-Ctrl, NuQuantum, Australia

This week in quantum computing news, HSBC, in partnership with Quantinuum, has made strides in securing digital assets against future quantum threats by trialing quantum-secure technology for trading tokenized physical gold. This is good because Gartner is forecasting a Q-Day by 2029. A team led by Harald Putterman has developed a hardware-efficient quantum error correction method using concatenated bosonic qubits, achieving a minimum logical error per cycle of 1.65% for a distance-5 code. This advancement suggests a promising path toward fault-tolerant quantum computing. Q-CTRL has integrated its Fire Opal software with the QCentroid platform, enhancing quantum optimization workflows and making quantum computing more accessible to businesses and developers. The European Union has allocated €65 million to advance quantum chip technologies, aiming to establish a robust European quantum ecosystem. IonQ has secured a massive contract with Air Force Research Lab, and at the same time achieved ion to ion entanglement, which is a key piece for quantum networking. No wonder their stock price had a great bump this week. Quandela will build “Lucy” in the EU. But IBM went first with their quantum DC in Germany. If you want to understand the new FIPS from NIST, Qcrypt wrote an excellent article. Is Qiskit good? How does it compare with other quantum frameworks? A recent paper proposes a benchmark for quantum solutions. NordVPN goes PQC. Nu Quantum, in collaboration with the UK's National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), has launched Project IDRA, a four-year initiative to develop optical networks for distributed quantum computing.