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Category: quantum physics – Page 513

Over the years, supercomputers have played a pivotal role in pushing the frontiers of science. Earlier this year, Meta launched one of the fastest AI supercomputers, the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), to build sophisticated AI models that can learn from trillions of examples; navigate hundreds of different languages; seamlessly analyse text, images, and video together; build AR tools etc.

However, the quest for something even faster than supercomputers led to the development of quantum computers. Last year, the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) introduced the world’s fastest programmable superconducting quantum computer; Zuchongzhi 2.1 is a million times faster than a conventional computer.

At last year’s I/O conference, Google unveiled a Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara, California, complete with a quantum data centre, quantum hardware research labs, and quantum processor chip fab facilities. The tech giant plans to build a useful, error-corrected quantum computer within a decade.

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Very thin wires made of a topological insulator could enable highly stable qubits, the building blocks of future quantum computers. Scientists see a new result in topological insulator devices as an important step towards realizing the technology’s potential.

An international group of scientists have demonstrated that wires more than 100 times thinner than a can act like a quantum one-way street for electrons when made of a peculiar material known as a .

The discovery opens the pathway for new technological applications of devices made from topological insulators and demonstrates a significant step on the road to achieving so-called topological qubits, which it has been predicted can robustly encode information for a quantum computer.

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Over the past decades, electronics engineers and material scientists worldwide have been investigating the potential of various materials for fabricating transistors, devices that amplify or switch electrical signals in electronic devices. Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors have been known to be particularly promising materials for fabricating the new electronic devices.

Despite their advantages, the use of these materials in electronics greatly depends on their integration with high-quality dielectrics, insulating materials or materials that are poor conductors of electrical current. These materials, however, can be difficult to deposit on 2D substrates.

Researchers at Nanyang Technological University, Peking University, Tsinghua University, and the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences have recently demonstrated the successful integration of single-crystal strontium titrate, a high-κ perovskite , with 2D semiconductors, using van der Waals forces. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, could open new possibilities for the development of new types of transistors and electronic components.

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Some materials, like wood, are insulators that block the flow of electricity. Conductors, such as copper, allow for electricity to flow through them. Other materials—semiconductors—can be either/or depending on conditions such as applied electric field or temperature. Unlike wood or copper or silicon, though, topological insulators (TIs) are an exotic state of matter that is conductive on the surface, but not in the bulk. Such unique material properties have great scientific implications and could be of use in a range of technologies, including wireless communications, radar and quantum information processing.

Through a , the research labs of Aravind Nagulu, assistant professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, and colleagues from Columbia University and the City University of New York’s Advanced Science Research Center have demonstrated the first implementation of an electromagnetic topological insulator on an integrated chip.

The collaborative project’s findings were published May 2 in the journal Nature Electronics.

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Forty years after it first began to dabble in quantum computing, IBM is ready to expand the technology out of the lab and into more practical applications — like supercomputing! The company has already hit a number of development milestones since it released its previous quantum roadmap in 2020, including the 127-qubit Eagle processor that uses quantum circuits and the Qiskit Runtime API. IBM announced on Wednesday that it plans to further scale its quantum ambitions and has revised the 2020 roadmap with an even loftier goal of operating a 4,000-qubit system by 2025.

Before it sets about building the biggest quantum computer to date, IBM plans release its 433-qubit Osprey chip later this year and migrate the Qiskit Runtime to the cloud in 2023, “bringing a serverless approach into the core quantum software stack,” per Wednesday’s release. Those products will be followed later that year by Condor, a quantum chip IBM is billing as “the world’s first universal quantum processor with over 1,000 qubits.”

This rapid four-fold jump in quantum volume (the number of qubits packed into a processor) will enable users to run increasingly longer quantum circuits, while increasing the processing speed — measured in CLOPS (circuit layer operations per second) — from a maximum of 2,900 OPS to over 10,000. Then it’s just a simple matter of quadrupaling that capacity in the span of less than 24 months.

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Leonard Susskind (Stanford University)
https://simons.berkeley.edu/events/quantum-colloquium-black-…ing-thesis.
Quantum Colloquium.

A few years ago three computer scientists named Adam Bouland, Bill Fefferman, and Umesh Vazirani, wrote a paper that promises to radically change the way we think about the interiors of black holes. Inspired by their paper I will explain how black holes threaten the QECTT, and how the properties of horizons rescue the thesis, and eventually make predictions for the complexity of extracting information from behind the black hole horizon. I’ll try my best to explain enough about black holes to keep the lecture self contained.

Panel featuring Scott Aaronson (UT Austin), Geoffrey Penington (UC Berkeley), and Edward Witten (IAS); Umesh Vazirani (UC Berkeley; moderator). 1:27:30.

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Since graphene was first isolated and characterized in the early 2000s, researchers have been exploring ways to use this atomically thin nanomaterial because of its unique properties such as high tensile strength and conductivity.

In more recent years, twisted bilayer graphene, made of two sheets of graphene twisted to a specific “magic” angle, has been shown to have superconductivity, meaning that it can conduct electricity with very little resistance. However, using this approach to make devices remains challenging because of the low yield of fabricating twisted bilayer graphene.

Now, a new study shows how patterned, periodic deformations of a single layer of graphene transforms it into a material with previously seen in twisted graphene bilayers. This system also hosts additional unexpected and interesting conducting states at the boundary. Through a better understanding of how unique properties occur when single sheets of graphene are subjected to periodic strain, this work has the potential to create quantum devices such as orbital magnets and superconductors in the future. The study, published in Physical Review Letters, was conducted by graduate student Võ Tiến Phong and professor Eugene Mele in Penn’s Department of Physics & Astronomy in the School of Arts & Sciences.

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We’re excited to present an update to the IBM Quantum roadmap, and our plan to weave quantum processors, CPUs, and GPUs into a compute fabric capable of solving problems beyond the scope of classical resources.

Two years ago, we issued our first draft of that map to take our first steps: our ambitious three-year plan to develop quantum computing technology, called our development roadmap. Since then, our exploration has revealed new discoveries, gaining us insights that have allowed us to refine that map and travel even further than we’d planned. Today, we’re excited to present to you an update to that map: our plan to weave quantum processors, CPUs, and GPUs into a compute fabric capable of solving problems beyond the scope of classical resources alone.

Our goal is to build quantum-centric supercomputers. The quantum-centric supercomputer will incorporate quantum processors, classical processors, quantum communication networks, and classical networks, all working together to completely transform how we compute. In order to do so, we need to solve the challenge of scaling quantum processors, develop a runtime environment for providing quantum calculations with increased speed and quality, and introduce a serverless programming model to allow quantum and classical processors to work together frictionlessly.

But first: where did this journey begin? We put the first quantum computer on the cloud in 2016, and in 2017, we introduced an open source software development kit for programming these quantum computers, called Qiskit. We debuted the first integrated quantum computer system, called the IBM Quantum System One, in 2019, then in 2020 we released our development roadmap showing how we planned to mature quantum computers into a commercial technology.

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