Tucked in the back of a laboratory at the IBM Research facility less than an hour north of New York City is a hulking mass of stainless steel and aluminum that looks like a sci-fi teleportation machine.
IBM promises a super-powerful quantum computer by decade’s end as it races against Google, Honeywell, and other rivals.
IBM today, for the first time, published its road map for the future of its quantum computing hardware. There is a lot to digest here, but the most important news in the short term is that the company believes it is on its way to building a quantum processor with more than 1,000 qubits — and somewhere between 10 and 50 logical qubits — by the end of 2023.
Currently, the company’s quantum processors top out at 65 qubits. It plans to launch a 127-qubit processor next year and a 433-qubit machine in 2022. To get to this point, IBM is also building a completely new dilution refrigerator to house these larger chips, as well as the technology to connect multiple of these units to build a system akin to today’s multi-core architectures in classical chips.
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020, leaders from three quantum computing startups joined TechCrunch editor Frederic Lardinois to discuss the future of the technology. IonQ CEO and president Peter Chapman suggested we could be as little as five years away from a desktop quantum computer, but not everyone agreed on that optimistic timeline.
“I think within the next several years, five years or so, you’ll start to see [desktop quantum machines]. Our goal is to get to a rack-mounted quantum computer,” Chapman said.
But that seemed a tad optimistic to Alan Baratz, CEO at D-Wave Systems. He says that when it comes to developing the super-conducting technology that his company is building, it requires a special kind of rather large quantum refrigeration unit called a dilution fridge, and that unit would make a five-year goal of having a desktop quantum PC highly unlikely.
Electricity and magnetism are closely related: Power lines generate a magnetic field, rotating magnets in a generator produce electricity. However, the phenomenon is much more complicated: electrical and magnetic properties of certain materials are also coupled with each other. Electrical properties of some crystals can be influenced by magnetic fields—and vice versa. In this case one speaks of a “magnetoelectric effect.” It plays an important technological role, for example in certain types of sensors or in the search for new concepts of data storage.
A special material was investigated for which, at first glance, no magnetoelectric effect would be expected at all. But careful experiments have now shown that the effect can be observed in this material, it only works completely differently than usual. It can be controlled in a highly sensitive way: Even small changes in the direction of the magnetic field can switch the electrical properties of the material to a completely different state.
The future of enterprise tech won’t be confined to the data center mothership — nor even the public cloud. Wedded to the internet of things, edge computing puts processing horsepower wherever it needs to go.
Microsoft’s unusual experiment in the sea off Orkney seems to have provided some valuable lessons.
Physicists from MIPT and the Russian Quantum Center, joined by colleagues from Saratov State University and Michigan Technological University, have demonstrated new methods for controlling spin waves in nanostructured bismuth iron garnet films via short laser pulses. Presented in Nano Letters, the solution has potential for applications in energy-efficient information transfer and spin-based quantum computing.
A particle’s spin is its intrinsic angular momentum, which always has a direction. In magnetized materials, the spins all point in one direction. A local disruption of this magnetic order is accompanied by the propagation of spin waves, whose quanta are known as magnons.
Unlike the electrical current, spin wave propagation does not involve a transfer of matter. As a result, using magnons rather than electrons to transmit information leads to much smaller thermal losses. Data can be encoded in the phase or amplitude of a spin wave and processed via wave interference or nonlinear effects.
The FCC authorized Microsoft to perform proof-of-concept demonstrations of a service that would connect its cloud computing service Azure with a ground station the company proposed to build.
“If the demonstrations result in significant market interest, Microsoft will file an application for regular earth station authority with the International Bureau (IB) to support future commercial operations,” the company wrote in the filings.
The company’s strategy will put it in competition with Amazon, which in November 2018 launched its similar AWS Ground Station service.
Continue reading “Microsoft wants to take on Amazon in connecting satellites to the cloud” »
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Magnetism offers new ways to create more powerful and energy-efficient computers, but the realization of magnetic computing on the nanoscale is a challenging task. A critical advancement in the field of ultralow power computation using magnetic waves is reported by a joint team from Kaiserslautern, Jena and Vienna in the journal Nano Letters.
A local disturbance in the magnetic order of a magnet can propagate across a material in the form of a wave. These waves are known as spin waves and their associated quasi-particles are called magnons. Scientists from the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Innovent e. V. Jena and the University of Vienna are known for their expertise in the research field called ‘magnonics,’ which utilizes magnons for the development of novel types of computers, potentially complementing the conventional electron-based processors used nowadays.
Continue reading “Magnonic nano-fibers opens the way towards new type of computers” »
