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Category: quantum physics

IonQ was founded on a gamble that ‘trapped ion quantum’ computing could outperform the silicon-based quantum computers that Google and others are building. As of right now, it does. IonQ has constructed a quantum computer that can perform calculations on a 79-qubit array, beating the previous king Google’s efforts by 7 qubits.

Their error rates are also the best in the business, with their single-qubit error rate at 99.97% while the nearest competitors are around the 99.5 mark, and a two-qubit error rate of 99.3% when most competitors are beneath 95%. But how does it compare to regular computers?

According to IonQ, in the kinds of workloads that quantum computers are being built for, it’s already overtaking them. The Bernstein-Vazirani Algorithm, a benchmark IonQ is hoping will take off, tests a computer’s ability to determine a single encoded number (called an oracle) when the computer can only ask a single yes/no question.

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We’re taught at school that energy can’t be created, merely converted from one form to another. But at the birth of the Universe – that is, everything – the energy needed for the Big Bang must have come from somewhere. Many cosmologists think its origin lies in so-called quantum uncertainty, which is known to allow energy to emerge literally from nowhere. What isn’t clear, however, is why this cosmic energy persisted long enough to drive the Big Bang.

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A startup based in Maryland has released and tested an impressive new quantum computer that demonstrates the power of an occasionally overlooked quantum computing architecture.

Companies like IBM, Google, and Rigetti are developing new kinds of computer processors that rely on the mathematics of subatomic particles to potentially perform calculations difficult for classical computers to do. These devices use superconductors as the basis for their qubits. A company called IonQ, however, has now announced a state-of-the-art system that relies on the quantum nature of atoms themselves, and it’s one of the best-performing quantum computers yet.

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I believe it is likely that we will have 10,000 qubit quantum computers within 5 to 10 years. There is rapidly advancing work by IonQ with trapped ion quantum computers and a range of superconducting quantum computer systems by Google, IBM, Intel, Rigetti and 2000–5000 qubit quantum annealing computers by D-Wave Systems.

10,000 qubit quantum computers should have computing capabilities far beyond any conventional computer for certain classes of problems. They will be beyond not just any regular computer today but any non-quantum computer ever for those kinds of problems.

Those quantum computers will help improve artificial intelligence systems. How certain is this development? What will it mean for humans and our world?

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IonQ just made a presentation on two new trapped ion quantum computers with 160 stored and 79 processing qubits. This is more qubits than the best noisy superconducting quantum computers which is currently the Google 72 Qubit Bristlecone processor.

* IonQ systems are at room temperature

* IonQ manipulates ions with magnets and lasers and have software control on mostly FPGA chips.

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by Eloisa Marchesoni

Today, I will talk about the recent creation of really intelligent machines, able to solve difficult problems, to recreate the creativity and versatility of the human mind, machines not only able to excel in a single activity but to abstract general information and find solutions that are unthinkable for us. I will not talk about blockchain, but about another revolution (less economic and more mathematical), which is all about computing: quantum computers.

Quantum computing is not really new, as we have been talking about it for a couple of decades already, but we are just now witnessing the transition from theory to realization of such technology. Quantum computers were first theorized at the beginning of the 1980s, but only in the last few years, thanks to the commitment of companies like Google and IBM, a strong impulse has been pushing the development of these machines. The quantum computer is able to use quantum particles (imagine them to be like electrons or photons) to process information. The particles act as positive or negative (i., the 0 and the 1 that we are used to see in traditional computer science) alternatively or at the same time, thus generating quantum information bits called “qubits”, which can have value either 0 or 1 or a quantum superposition of 0 and 1.

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The promise of quantum computing brings with it some mind-blowing potential, but it also carries a new set of risks, scientists are warning.

Specifically, the enormous power of the tech could be used to crack the best cyber security we currently have in place.

A new report on the “progress and prospects” of quantum computing put together by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) in the US says that work should start now on putting together algorithms to beat the bad guys.

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Australian scientists have investigated new directions to scale up qubits—utilising the spin-orbit coupling of atom qubits—adding a new suite of tools to the armory.

Spin-orbit coupling, the coupling of the qubits’ orbital and spin degree of freedom, allows the manipulation of the via electric, rather than magnetic-fields. Using the electric dipole coupling between qubits means they can be placed further apart, thereby providing flexibility in the chip fabrication process.

In one of these approaches, published in Science Advances, a team of scientists led by UNSW Professor Sven Rogge investigated the spin-orbit coupling of a boron atom in silicon.

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Scientists mapping out the quantum characteristics of superconductors—materials that conduct electricity with no energy loss—have entered a new regime. Using newly connected tools named OASIS at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, they’ve uncovered previously inaccessible details of the “phase diagram” of one of the most commonly studied “high-temperature” superconductors. The newly mapped data includes signals of what happens when superconductivity vanishes.

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