Computers play an important role in many aspects of life today. Digital computers are the most widely used, while quantum computers are well known. However, the least known computers are the so-called Stochastic Pulse Computers. Their work is based on highly parallel logical operations between trains of electrical pulses, where the pulses occur at random times, as in neurons, the nerve cells in the brains of humans and mammals.
Researchers from the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies of the Cnr and the Politecnico di Milano have built a battery which, following the laws of quantum physics, has a recharge time that is inversely related to the amount of stored energy.
Quantum batteries are a new class of energy storage devices that operate according to the principles of quantum physics, the science that studies the infinitely small where the laws of classical physics do not always apply. Tersilla Virgili of the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies of the National Research Council (Cnr-Ifn) and Giulio Cerullo of the Physics Department of the Politecnico di Milano have shown that it is possible to manufacture a type of quantum battery where the charging power increases faster by increasing the battery capacity. The work, carried out together with other international research groups, was published in Science Advances.
“Quantum batteries have a counter-intuitive property in which the recharge time is inversely related to the battery capacity, that is the amount of stored electrical charge,” explains Virgili. “This leads to the intriguing idea that the charging power of quantum batteries is super-extensive, meaning that it increases faster with battery size.”
At just 1/1000th of a millimeter, nanoparticles are impossible to see with the naked eye. But, despite being small, they’re extremely important in many ways. If scientists want to take a close look at DNA, proteins, or viruses, then being able to isolate and monitor nanoparticles is essential.
Trapping these particles involves tightly focusing a laser beam to a point that produces a strong electromagnetic field. This beam can hold particles just like a pair of tweezers but, unfortunately, there are natural restrictions to this technique. Most notable are the size restrictions—if the particle is too small, the technique won’t work. To date, optical tweezers have been unable to hold particles like individual proteins, which are only a few nanometers in diameter.
Now, due to recent advances in nanotechnology, researchers in the Light-Matter Interactions for Quantum Technologies Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have developed a technique for precise nanoparticle trapping. In this study, they overcame the natural restrictions by developing optical tweezers based on metamaterials —a synthetic material with specific properties that do not occur naturally. This was the first time that this kind of metamaterial had been used for single nanoparticle trapping.
BERKELEY, Calif. 0, Jan. 20, 2022 — Atom Computing, the creators of the first quantum computer made of nuclear-spin qubits from optically-trapped neutral atoms, today announced closure of a $60M Series B round. Third Point Ventures led the round, followed by Primer Movers Lab and insiders including Innovation Endeavors, Venrock and Prelude Ventures. Following the completion of their first 100-qubit quantum computing system with world-record 40 second coherence times, Atom Computing will use this new investment to build their second-generation quantum computing systems and commercialize the technology.
“Atom Computing designed and built our first-generation machine, Phoenix 0, in less than two years and our team was the fastest to deliver a 100-qubit system,” said Rob Hays 0, CEO and President, Atom Computing. “We gained valuable learnings from the system and have proven the technology. The investment announced today accelerates the commercialization opportunities and we look forward to bringing this to market.”
With this new level of investment, the company will turn its focus to developing much larger systems that are required to run commercial use-cases with paradigm-shifting compute performance.
UNSW Sydney-led research paves the way for large silicon-based quantum processors for real-world manufacturing and application.
Australian researchers have proven that near error-free quantum computing is possible, paving the way to build silicon-based quantum devices compatible with current semiconductor manufacturing technology.
“Today’s publication in Nature shows our operations were 99 percent error-free,” says Professor Andrea Morello of UNSW, who led the work.
Official launch marks a milestone in the development of quantum computing in Europe.
A quantum annealer with more than 5,000 qubits has been put into operation at Forschungszentrum Jülich. The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and D-Wave Systems, a leading provider of quantum computing systems, today launched the company’s first cloud-based quantum service outside North America. The new system is located at Jülich and will work closely with the supercomputers at JSC in the future. The annealing quantum computer is part of the Jülich UNified Infrastructure for Quantum computing (JUNIQ), which was established in autumn 2019 to provide researchers in Germany and Europe with access to various quantum systems.
UNSW Sydney-led research paves the way for large silicon-based quantum processors for real-world manufacturing and application.
Australian researchers have proven that near error-free quantum computing is possible, paving the way to build silicon-based quantum devices compatible with current semiconductor manufacturing technology.
“Today’s publication in Nature shows our operations were 99 percent error-free,” says Professor Andrea Morello of UNSW, who led the work.
Time crystals. Microwaves. Diamonds. What do these three disparate things have in common?
Quantum computing. Unlike traditional computers that use bits, quantum computers use qubits to encode information as zeros or ones, or both at the same time. Coupled with a cocktail of forces from quantum physics, these fridge-sized machines can process a whole lot of information – but they’re far from flawless. Just like our regular computers, we need to have the right programming languages to properly compute on quantum computers.
Programming quantum computers requires awareness of something called “entanglement”, a computational multiplier for qubits of sorts, which translates to a lot of power. When two qubits are entangled, actions on one qubit can change the value of the other even when they are physically separated, giving rise to Einstein’s characterization of “spooky action at a distance.” But that potency is equal parts a source of weakness. When programming, discarding one qubit without being mindful of its entanglement with another qubit can destroy the data stored in the other, jeopardizing the correctness of the program.
Researchers at the University of Adelaide and their overseas partners have taken a key step in making quantum batteries a reality. They have successfully proved the concept of superabsorption, a crucial idea underpinning quantum batteries.
“Quantum batteries, which use quantum mechanical principles to enhance their capabilities, require less charging time the bigger they get,” said Dr. James Q. Quach, who is a Ramsay Fellow in the School of Physical Sciences and the Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS), at the University of Adelaide.
“It is theoretically possible that the charging power of quantum batteries increases faster than the size of the battery which could allow new ways to speed charging.”
Researchers from RIKEN and QuTech—a collaboration between TU Delft and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO)— have achieved a key milestone toward the development of a fault-tolerant quantum computer. They were able to demonstrate a two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.5 percent—higher than the 99 percent considered to be the threshold for building fault-tolerant computers—using electron spin qubits in silicon, which are promising for large-scale quantum computers as the nanofabrication technology for building them already exists. This study was published in Nature.
The world is currently in a race to develop large-scale quantum computers that could vastly outperform classical computers in certain areas. However, these efforts have been hindered by a number of factors, including in particular the problem of decoherence, or noise generated in the qubits. This problem becomes more serious with the number of qubits, hampering scaling up. In order to achieve a large-scale computer that could be used for useful applications, it is believed that a two-qubit gate fidelity of at least 99 percent to implement the surface code for error correction is required. This has been achieved in certain types of computers, using qubits based on superconducting circuits, trapped ions, and nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond, but these are hard to scale up to the millions of qubits required to implement practical quantum computation with an error correction.
To address these problems, the group decided to experiment with a quantum dot structure that was nanofabricated on a strained silicon/silicon germanium quantum well substrate, using a controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate. In previous experiments, the gate fidelity was limited due to slow gate speed. To improve the gate speed, they carefully designed the device and tuned it by applying different voltages to the gate electrodes. This combined an established fast single-spin rotation technique using micromagnets with large two-qubit coupling. The result was a gate speed that was 10 times better than previous attempts. Interestingly, although it had been thought that increasing gate speed would always lead to better fidelity, they found that there was a limit beyond which increasing the speed actually made the fidelity worse.