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Category: quantum physics

Researchers at Hokkaido University and Amoeba Energy in Japan have, inspired by the efficient foraging behavior of a single-celled amoeba, developed an analog computer for finding a reliable and swift solution to the traveling salesman problem—a representative combinatorial optimization problem.

Many real-world application tasks such as planning and scheduling in logistics and automation are mathematically formulated as combinatorial optimization problems. Conventional digital computers, including supercomputers, are inadequate to solve these in practically permissible time as the number of candidate solutions they need to evaluate increases exponentially with the problem size—also known as combinatorial explosion. Thus new computers called Ising machines, including quantum annealers, have been actively developed in recent years. These machines, however, require complicated pre-processing to convert each task to the form they can handle and have a risk of presenting illegal solutions that do not meet some constraints and requests, resulting in major obstacles to the practical applications.

These obstacles can be avoided using the newly developed ‘electronic amoeba,’ an inspired by a single-celled amoeboid organism. The amoeba is known to maximize nutrient acquisition efficiently by deforming its body. It has shown to find an approximate solution to the (TSP), i.e., given a map of a certain number of cities, the problem is to find the shortest route for visiting each exactly once and returning to the starting city. This finding inspired Professor Seiya Kasai at Hokkaido University to mimic the dynamics of the amoeba electronically using an analog circuit, as described in the journal Scientific Reports. “The amoeba core searches for a solution under the electronic environment where resistance values at intersections of crossbars represent constraints and requests of the TSP,” says Kasai. Using the crossbars, the city layout can be easily altered by updating the resistance values without complicated pre-processing.

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JILA researchers have developed tools to “turn on” quantum gases of ultracold molecules, gaining control of long-distance molecular interactions for potential applications such as encoding data for quantum computing and simulations.

The new scheme for nudging a down to its lowest energy state, called quantum degeneracy, while suppressing that break up finally makes it possible to explore exotic quantum states in which all the molecules interact with one another.

The research is described in the Dec. 10 issue of Nature. JILA is a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder.

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Researchers have found a way to protect highly fragile quantum systems from noise, which could aid in the design and development of new quantum devices, such as ultra-powerful quantum computers.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, have shown that microscopic particles can remain intrinsically linked, or entangled, over long distances even if there are random disruptions between them. Using the mathematics of quantum theory, they discovered a simple setup where entangled particles can be prepared and stabilized even in the presence of noise by taking advantage of a previously unknown symmetry in .

Their results, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, open a new window into the mysterious quantum world that could revolutionize future technology by preserving in , which is the single biggest hurdle for developing such technology. Harnessing this capability will be at the heart of ultrafast quantum computers.

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Quantum computing startup IonQ today announced its road map for the next few years — following a similar move from IBM in September — and it’s quite ambitious, to say the least.

At our Disrupt event earlier this year, IonQ CEO and president Peter Chapman suggested that we were only five years away from having desktop quantum computers. That’s not something you’ll likely hear from the company’s competitors — who also often use a very different kind of quantum technology — but IonQ now says that it will be able to sell modular, rack-mounted quantum computers for the data center in 2023 and that by 2025, its systems will be powerful enough to achieve broad quantum advantage across a wide variety of use cases.

In an interview ahead of today’s announcement, Chapman showed me a prototype of the hardware the company is working on for 2021, which fits on a workbench. The actual quantum chip is currently the size of a half-dollar and the company is now working on essentially putting the core of its technology on a single chip, with all of the optics that make its system work integrated.

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In groundbreaking new research, an international team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has developed a unique process for producing a quantum state that is part light and part matter.

The discovery provides fundamental new insights for more efficiently developing the next generation of quantum-based optical and electronic devices. The research could also have an impact on increasing efficiency of nanoscale chemical reactions.

The research is published in Nature Photonics.

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In what could be one of the significant developments in the field of quantum computing, Chinese researchers suggest having achieved quantum supremacy with the capability of performing calculations 100 trillion times faster than the world’s most advanced supercomputer. Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, believe that when put into practical use, it can carry calculations in minutes which would have otherwise taken two billion years to perform. The fastest supercomputers, before this, claimed to have achieved computational efficiency easing up to 10,000 years of calculations.

Jiuzhang, as the supercomputer is called, has outperformed Google’s supercomputer, which the company had claimed last year to have achieved quantum computing supremacy. The supercomputer by Google named Sycamore is a 54-qubit processor, consisting of high-fidelity quantum logic gates that could perform the target computation in 200 seconds.

The researchers explored Boson sampling, a task considered to be a strong candidate to demonstrate quantum computational advantage. As the researcher cited in the research paper, they performed Gaussian boson sampling (GBS), which is a new paradigm of boson sampling, one of the first feasible protocols for quantum computational advantage. In boson sampling and its variants, nonclassical light is injected into a linear optical network, which generates highly random photon-number, measured by single-photon detectors.

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Columbia team discovers 6-nanometer-long single-molecule circuit with enormous on/off ratio due to quantum interference; finding could enable faster, smaller, and more energy-efficient devices.

Researchers, led by Columbia Engineering Professor Latha Venkataraman, report today that they have discovered a new chemical design principle for exploiting destructive quantum interference. They used their approach to create a six-nanometer single-molecule switch where the on-state current is more than 10,000 times greater than the off-state current–the largest change in current achieved for a single-molecule circuit to date.

This new switch relies on a type of quantum interference that has not, up to now, been explored. The researchers used long molecules with a special central unit to enhance destructive quantum interference between different electronic energy levels. They demonstrated that their approach can be used to produce very stable and reproducible single-molecule switches at room temperature that can carry currents exceeding 0.1 microamps in the on-state. The length of the switch is similar to the size of the smallest computer chips currently on the market and its properties approach those of commercial switches. The study is published today in Nature Nanotechnology.

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