No, Chinese researchers have not break encryption (yet). The news come from a paper that makes that claim, but this is simply an experiment running. The paper available here. The paper researches the potential of quantum annealing in breaking RSA encryption. But it is far from actually doing it. They have done it for a 22 bit number (a bit far from the traditional RSA used today) on a method that raises questions on scalability.GP Bullhound led a record-breaking $113 million Series B funding round for Q-CTRL completing their previous round. This is one of the biggest funding rounds for a private quantum company so far. Congratulations to the team!While some grow, some die. It is the nature of companies. Quantum or otherwise. Unfortunately Zapata’s board of directors has decided to halt operations and dismiss the majority of its workforce, including the Chief Financial Officer, as of October 9, 2024. This decision comes amidst financial turmoil, with the company unable to meet its outstanding debt obligations of approximately $2.3 million and other creditor amounts, as its assets fall short of covering these debts. Zapata booked revenues south of $6M and will go down in history as the company that pushed on VQE, one of the first quantum copmanies and the first public / SPAC going down. Meanwhile the other two SPAC’ed companies (Rigetti and D-Wave) are facing delisting again as their share price dropped $1 for far too long.Also, a significant breakthrough was announced by a team from the Munich Quantum Valley, led by the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the start-up planqc. They successfully maintained a quantum register of 1200 neutral atoms in continuous operation for over an hour, addressing the challenge of atomic losses by reloading atoms every 3.5 seconds. The quantum technology market is projected to reach $1.2 trillion, with quantum sensing expected to surpass $300 billion by 2029. Additionally, Toyota's collaboration with Xanadu aims to leverage quantum computing for advancements in materials simulations, potentially revolutionizing automotive materials. Google takes a next step in error correction (still in a problem far from applicability). FS-ISAC releases a seminal paper on PQC that will be very useful in Europe. Telefonica continues evolving in quantum comms. If last week IBM’s quantum computer went live in Germany with a lot of fanfare, this week Eviden’s IQM QC goes live in France. A QC for everyone!
Apropos of both the Zapata and Chinese research topics, I guess I should have hyped more a 2021 npj Quantum Information paper I did with Zapata. In "Analyzing the performance of variational quantum factoring on a superconducting quantum processor", we were able to "factor" (after a lot of classical pre-processing) the integer 1099551473989 with *just* 3 qubits.....😂
(FWIW, the point of this work was using their variational quantum factoring algorithm as a way to evaluate processor performance when running QAOA -- not to demonstrate that you could use gate-based QCs for decryption.)
Apropos of both the Zapata and Chinese research topics, I guess I should have hyped more a 2021 npj Quantum Information paper I did with Zapata. In "Analyzing the performance of variational quantum factoring on a superconducting quantum processor", we were able to "factor" (after a lot of classical pre-processing) the integer 1099551473989 with *just* 3 qubits.....😂
(FWIW, the point of this work was using their variational quantum factoring algorithm as a way to evaluate processor performance when running QAOA -- not to demonstrate that you could use gate-based QCs for decryption.)