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Category: quantum physics

As reported in a new article in Nature Reviews Physics, instead of waiting for fully mature quantum computers to emerge, Los Alamos National Laboratory and other leading institutions have developed hybrid classical/quantum algorithms to extract the most performance—and potentially quantum advantage—from today’s noisy, error-prone hardware. Known as variational quantum algorithms, they use the quantum boxes to manipulate quantum systems while shifting much of the work load to classical computers to let them do what they currently do best: solve optimization problems.

“Quantum computers have the promise to outperform for certain tasks, but on currently available quantum hardware they can’t run long algorithms. They have too much noise as they interact with environment, which corrupts the information being processed,” said Marco Cerezo, a physicist specializing in , quantum machine learning, and quantum information at Los Alamos and a lead author of the paper. “With variational , we get the best of both worlds. We can harness the power of quantum computers for tasks that classical computers can’t do easily, then use classical computers to compliment the computational power of quantum devices.”

Current noisy, intermediate scale quantum computers have between 50 and 100 qubits, lose their “quantumness” quickly, and lack error correction, which requires more qubits. Since the late 1990s, however, theoreticians have been developing algorithms designed to run on an idealized large, error-correcting, fault tolerant quantum computer.

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Quantum engineers from UNSW Sydney have removed a major obstacle that has stood in the way of quantum computers becoming a reality. They discovered a new technique they say will be capable of controlling millions of spin qubits—the basic units of information in a silicon quantum processor.

Until now, quantum computer engineers and scientists have worked with a proof-of-concept model of quantum processors by demonstrating the control of only a handful of qubits.

But with their latest research, published today in Science Advances, the team have found what they consider “the missing jigsaw piece” in the quantum computer architecture that should enable the control of the millions of qubits needed for extraordinarily complex calculations.

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In this work, we introduce a classical variational method for simulating QAOA, a hybrid quantum-classical approach for solving combinatorial optimizations with prospects of quantum speedup on near-term devices. We employ a self-contained approximate simulator based on NQS methods borrowed from many-body quantum physics, departing from the traditional exact simulations of this class of quantum circuits.

We successfully explore previously unreachable regions in the QAOA parameter space, owing to good performance of our method near optimal QAOA angles. Model limitations are discussed in terms of lower fidelities in quantum state reproduction away from said optimum. Because of such different area of applicability and relative low computational cost, the method is introduced as complementary to established numerical methods of classical simulation of quantum circuits.

Classical variational simulations of quantum algorithms provide a natural way to both benchmark and understand the limitations of near-future quantum hardware. On the algorithmic side, our approach can help answer a fundamentally open question in the field, namely whether QAOA can outperform classical optimization algorithms or quantum-inspired classical algorithms based on artificial neural networks48,49,50.

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The goal is to pre-empt the fall of traditional cryptography likely to follow the quantum revolution.

A research team with the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have designed a quantum cryptography chip aimed at the security demands of the quantum computing revolution. The RISC-V chip, which was already sent to manufacturing according to the researchers’ design, aims to be a working proof of concept for protecting systems against quantum computing-based attacks, which are generally considered to be one of the most important security frontiers of the future. Alongside the RISC-V based hardware implementation (which includes ASIC and FPGA structures), the researchers also developed 29 additional instructions for the architecture that enable the required workloads to be correctly processed on-chip.

Traditional cryptography is generally based on both the sender and receiver holding the same “unlock” key for any given encrypted data. These keys (which may include letters, digits, and special characters) have increased in length as time passes, accompanying increases in hardware performance available in the general computing sphere. The idea is to thwart brute-force attacks that would simply try out enough character combinations that would allow them to eventually reach the correct answer that unlocks the encrypted messages’ contents. Given a big enough size of the security key (and also depending on the encryption protocol used), it’s virtually impossible for current hardware — even with the extreme parallelization enabled by the most recent GPUs — to try out enough combinations in a short enough timeframe to make the effort worthwhile.

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The Astronomy, Technology, and Space Science News Podcast.
SpaceTime Series 24 Episode 91
*Astronomers zero in on source of the impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs.
A new study claims the impactor believed to have wiped out and 75 percent of all life on Earth 66 million years ago including all the non-avian dinosaurs — likely came from the outer half of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
*Producing matter out of pure energy.
Scientists have directly converted pure light energy into matter in a single process for the first time.
The findings reported in the journal Physical Review Letters involved the creation of Electrons and their antimatter counter parts positrons — by colliding quantum packets of photons – light particles.
*Discovery of a galactic stream of galaxy clusters.
Astronomers have discovered a never-before-seen galaxy cluster with a black hole at its centre, travelling at high speed along an intergalactic road of matter.
*Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo making space history with double flyby of Venus.
As we go to air tonight the European Space Agency is making space history with two of its space craft6 undertaking almost simultaneous flybys of the planet Venus.
*The Science Report.
New US congressional report says COVID-19 leaked out of Chinese Government Wuhan Lab.
Wearing masks and social distancing even when vaccinated key to combat new COVID strains.
Rising sea levels may mean fewer eruptions from volcanic islands.
How slowing of the planet’s rotation could have paved the way for life on Earth.
Skeptic’s guide to low vaccination and low IQ.
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Majoranas particles found.

Majorana particles have been getting bad publicity: a claimed discovery in ultracold nanowires had to be retracted. Now Leiden physicists open up a new door to detecting Majoranas in a different experimental system, the Fu-Kane heterostructure, they announce in Physical Review Letters.

Majorana particles are quasiparticles: collective movements of particles (electrons in this case) which behave as single particles. If detected in real life, they could be used to build stable quantum computers.

“Majoranas are quantum mechanical superpositions,” explains Gal Lemut. This superposition, a special kind of combination, comprises an electron and a hole (a place in a crystal where an electron is missing.

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Since receiving a $25 million grant in 2,019 to become the first National Science Foundation (NSF) Quantum Foundry, UC Santa Barbara researchers affiliated with the foundry have been working to develop materials that can enable quantum information-based technologies for such applications as quantum computing, communications, sensing, and simulation.

They may have done it.

In a new paper, published in the journal Nature Materials, foundry co-director and UCSB professor Stephen Wilson and multiple co-authors, including key collaborators at Princeton University, study a new material developed in the Quantum Foundry as a candidate superconductor—a material in which electrical resistance disappears and magnetic fields are expelled—that could be useful in future quantum computation.

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‘Some forms of encryption used today can be broken by future large-scale quantum computers, which drives a search for alternatives’

“Some forms of encryption used today can be broken by future large-scale quantum computers, which also drives a search for alternatives,” Ling said.

In a canned statement, the NUS said AWS will gain access to the university’s National Quantum-Safe Network, a vendor-neutral platform for developing technology and integrating some of it into local fiber networks.

“The understanding that we are using quantum communications technology to support experiments using existing fiber is correct,” AWS ASEAN managing director Tan Lee Chew told The Register.

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Lurking in the background of the quest for true quantum supremacy hangs an awkward possibility – hyper-fast number crunching tasks based on quantum trickery might just be a load of hype.

Now, a pair of physicists from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and Columbia University in the US have come up with a better way to judge the potential of near-term quantum devices – by simulating the quantum mechanics they rely upon on more traditional hardware.

Their study made use of a neural network developed by EPFL’s Giuseppe Carleo and his colleague Matthias Troyer back in 2,016 using machine learning to come up with an approximation of a quantum system tasked with running a specific process.

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A new article in Science magazine gives an overview of almost three decades of research into colloidal quantum dots, assesses the technological progress for these nanometer-sized specs of semiconductor matter, and weighs the remaining challenges on the path to widespread commercialization for this promising technology with applications in everything from TVs to highly efficient sunlight collectors.

“Thirty years ago, these structures were just a subject of scientific curiosity studied by a small group of enthusiasts. Over the years, have become industrial-grade materials exploited in a range of traditional and emerging technologies, some of which have already found their way into commercial markets,” said Victor I. Klimov, a coauthor of the paper and leader of the team conducting quantum dot research at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Many advances described in the Science article originated at Los Alamos, including the first demonstration of colloidal quantum dot lasing, the discovery of carrier multiplication, pioneering research into quantum dot light emitting diodes (LEDs) and luminescent solar concentrators, and recent studies of single-dot quantum emitters.

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