Enlarge (credit: Donald Jorgensen | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ) Quantum computing has come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years. Indeed, once the big technology companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google started showing an interest, I kind of stopped keeping track. Nevertheless, research on the basic elements of quantum computing continues […]
Enlarge / Microsoft says it sees two clear peaks at the ends of a wire, with a nice energy separation between those and any other energy states. (credit: Microsoft) So far, two primary quantum computing technologies have been commercialized. One type of hardware, called a transmon, involves superconducting wire loops linked to a resonator; it is […]
Enlarge / A cartoon diagram of the trapped ion system. (credit: IonQ) Back in 2020, we talked to the CEO of a quantum computing startup called IonQ that uses trapped ions for its qubits. At the time, the company had just introduced a quantum processor that could host 32 qubits that had impressive fidelity, meaning […]
Enlarge / A representation of the two phosphorus nuclei (Q1 and Q2) with the electron (Q3) that helps mediate their interactions. (credit: Tony Melov / UNSW) Over the last few years, the big question in quantum computing has shifted from “can we get this to work?” to “can we get this to scale?” It’s no […]
Enlarge / The Aspen-M 40-qubit chip and its housing. (credit: Rigetti) On Wednesday, quantum computing startup Rigetti announced a number of interesting hardware developments. To begin with, its users would now have access to its next-generation chip, called Apsen-M, with 40 qubits and improved performance. While that’s well below the qubit count achieved by IBM, […]
Enlarge / Google’s Sycamore processor. (credit: Google) Recently, when researchers were testing error correction on Google’s quantum processor, they noted an odd phenomenon where the whole error-correction scheme would sporadically fail badly. They chalked this up to background radiation, a combination of cosmic rays and the occasional decay of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope. It […]
Enlarge / Given the right data, a neural network can infer what radar maps would have looked like, were they available. (credit: NOAA/CIMSS. ) It’s become increasingly clear that quantum computers won’t possess a single moment when they become clearly superior to classical hardware. Instead, we’re likely to see them becoming useful for a narrow […]
Enlarge / Google’s Sycamore processor. (credit: Google) In 2019, word filtered out that a quantum computer built by Google had performed calculations that the company claimed would be effectively impossible to replicate on supercomputing hardware. That turned out to not be entirely correct, since Google had neglected to consider the storage available to supercomputers; if […]
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