Latest in quantum technologies development Th
Post# of 22415
The Times Of India, Mumbai, India
The Indian Union Budget for 2020-21 allocated a humongous ₹8,000cr (Rs 8,000 crore = US$1.1 billion) for quantum computing over five years. The government said it would be used for a National Mission on Quantum Technologies and Applications. The US, China and the European Union are all in a battle for quantum superiority.
In 2018, US President Donald Trump signed a law that earmarked $1.2 billion for quantum research. Chinese President Xi Jinping has committed billions of dollars for quantum computing, including to establish a Chinese National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences. China expects to achieve significant quantum breakthroughs by 2030. India clearly does not want to be left behind.
Why this race to quantum? It’s the holy grail of the technology industry. Quantum computing will process data of mind-boggling sizes in a few milliseconds, something a classical computer would take years to do. Google recently demonstrated the possibilities when a quantum computer it built called Sycamore performed a random sampling calculation in three minutes and 20 seconds, something that it said would take today’s most powerful supercomputer about 10,000 years to solve. IBM, whose supercomputer Google had used to perform portions of the same calculation, later said that programming tweaks would enable the supercomputer to do the calculation in 2.5 days. Either way, the difference is massive. And quantum is still in its infancy.
In classical computing, machines use binary code, a series of ones and zeros, to transmit and process information, whereas in a quantum computer, it is qubit (a quantum bit) that enables the communication. “A qubit can be in the states of zero and one, but it can also be in a combination of these two states (superposition). The state space in a quantum is exponential. As you increase the number of qubits, the number of states available goes up. And that’s the value it provides,” says Shesha Shayee Raghunathan, advisory R&D engineer and Q Ambassador at IBM.
Marc Carrel-Billiard, senior MD at Accenture Labs and Accenture Extended Reality, says the quantum computing revolution will drive a definitive transformation in how innovation is accomplished in the enterprise. He said Accenture is helping clients understand the future potential of this new computing power and has developed more than 150 use cases globally across various industries where quantum computing will bring breakthroughs in solving problems that couldn’t be solved in the past. “We’re also helping to guide business experimentation and building quantum-enabled applications that create new sources of competitive advantage,” he added.
Intel Labs in December 2019 unveiled what is believed to be a firstof-its-kind cryogenic control chip — code-named Horse Ridge — that will speed up development of fullstack quantum computing systems. Jim Clarke, Intel’s director of quantum hardware, had said during its launch that there had been a lot of emphasis on the qubits themselves, but the ability to control many qubits at the same time had been a challenge for the industry. “Intel recognised that quantum controls were an essential piece of the puzzle we needed to solve in order to develop a large-scale commercial quantum system,” he said.
Companies like Automatski, which has a presence in Bengaluru and Los Angeles, are performing research into several areas of quantum-inspired software to simulate various quantum computing configurations. Chennai-based startup Quantica Computacao’s founder and CEO Bhagvan Kommadi says the company has started providing quantum AI solutions to trading and wealth management customers. “IBM, Google, and Microsoft are providing quantum OS (operating system) and SDK (software development kit). We look to provide quantum cloud services soon,” he says.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
© University of New South Wales Australian scientists have used artificial atoms called quantum dots to make a quantum silicon chip that's surprisingly stable. The quantum dots make "qubits."
A research team has made a quantum chip using more stable, multi-electron quantum dots. The same team has been working on a quantum dot periodic table of its silicon artificial atoms. An electrical charge draws electrons, which arrange themselves into layers and form quantum dots.
Australian scientists have used artificial atoms called quantum dots to make a quantum silicon chip they say is surprisingly stable. The quantum dots make quantum bits, or qubits, and the qubits’s instability has been a bottleneck in designing this kind of chip.
The University of South Wales has made news for previous qubit developments like a suggested periodic table, and the same team is working on the new silicon qubit chips. The quantum dots themselves are made of silicon, and in an artificial atom structure, electrons still swirl and act, but just aren’t surrounding an elemental nucleus.
For this circuit, the research team called on its artificial atoms that have higher numbers of electrons, which the researchers found made for “much more robust qubits” in the resulting chip. These artificial atoms are made by stimulating silicon with electricity in a specific way that attracts electrons from the surrounding silicon material. The electrons begin to arrange themselves right away. The center is a “gate electrode,” and the electrons surrounding it are in 2D orbits rather than the 3D orbits found in nature.
All of this happens in a space of just 10 nanometers, and the extreme tininess and precision required means that even slightly, microscopically impure silicon materials could throw off the whole process. The group found that as more electrons were attracted to the gate electrodes, a bigger, more densely packed outermost shell protected the innermost layers from instability. Suddenly, the same exact sample of silicon could foster more stable, more robust qubits.
Naturally occurring silicon has an atomic number of 14, with 14 electrons that are arranged in valence layers of 2, 8, and 4. In this experiment, researchers found that artificial atoms also were most stable with three valence layers. These layers create the stability. “Their utility indicates that it is not necessary to operate quantum dot qubits at single-electron occupancy, where disorder can degrade their reliability and performance,” the team writes.
Think of a quantum dot in this scenario as a kid jumping rope. It takes concentration and effort to keep jumping and spinning the rope. But the same kid also has to watch for people walking into their space and disrupting their activity, and when that happens, they’re expected to handle it while still jumping rope. Now, there’s a circle of enforcers preventing interference, letting the jumper keep jumping.
Within their setup, the configurations that result in qubits depends on how many valence electrons there are.
“We observe four shells (31 electrons) with multiplicities given by spin and valley degrees of freedom. Various fillings containing a single valence electron—namely 1, 5, 13 and 25 electrons—are found to be potential qubits,” the team writes. These artificial setups match real elements, too. “When we create the equivalent of Hydrogen, Lithium and Sodium in the quantum dot, we are basically able to use that lone electron on the outer shell as a qubit,” participating Ph.D. student Ross Leon says.
The extra electron that spills over into a new shell tilts the artificial atom’s energy, allowing it to be positioned to carry data. Once electrons are in pairs, they cancel each other out by design, which is why the “qubit values” are all odd.
The team says its next step is to examine how these neighboring quantum dots can interact or even bond, and how that will affect their computing.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Trump’s new budget pours billions into AI and quantum R&D
https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/02/11/trum...uantum-rd/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~