Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,400 researchers, we publish on Fridays and are always looking for news from across the country. Want to see your work featured? Submit your ideas to the editor.

Quantum software

“The way we classify problems as “hard” or “easy” is changing,” software developer Alex Williams wrote in Communications of the ACM. “And that shift? It’s going to punch through every layer of the stack, from AI models to cloud schedulers to database query engines.”

“[H]ere’s the hidden crisis: we’re not re-architecting the software…Our libraries, frameworks, and even our debugging practices assume deterministic, sequential processing. But quantum computing doesn’t play by those rules. It’s probabilistic. It’s non-linear. It collapses states…Most software teams have no quantum strategy. They don’t know which parts of their stack are vulnerable to disruption. There’s no roadmap for gradual migration. That has to change — now.”

Read the full essay in CACM.

Tunable kagome lattice materials

Using a variety of techniques, an international team led by Rice exposed the mechanism of annealing in iron germanide and its impact on magneto-transport, charge density wave order, and magnetism. Their findings established iron germanide as the only kagome lattice material with tunable charge density wave and magnetic order.

“Our results not only explain a long-standing mystery but also highlight the potential of kagome materials for in-situ novel sensors and quantum devices through a simple annealing process,” said Mason Klemm, graduate student at Rice. The team also included members from Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University, Switzerland’s Center for Neutron and Muon Sciences, Oak Ridge National Lab, and Cornell.

This study appeared in Nature Communications.

Cascaded-mode interferometer

Physicists at Harvard designed a cascaded-mode interferometer with much broader spectrum-engineering capabilities than conventional interferometers. Integrated into a single-chip waveguide, it has a nanoscale pattern of gratings etched into the waveguide that control the energy exchange between different modes of light — allowing it to create arbitrary spectral shapes and enabling energy exchange akin to a beam splitter.

The team predicts that the device could be used in advanced nanophotonic sensors or on-chip quantum computing, according to a Harvard announcement.

This work was published in Science Advances.

Billion-parameter AI model

Researchers at China’s Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center reported using their Origin Wukong superconducting quantum computer to finetune a billion-parameter AI model. The optimized model achieved a 15 percent reduction in training loss on a dataset, and the accuracy rate for the mathematical reasoning task increased from 68 percent to 82 percent, according to the state-run newspaper Global Times.

Quickbits

• Accenture releases report on data center futures, including quantum

• Three-qubit system with three transmons and a single fixed-frequency resonator coupler (Scientific Reports)

• $10.8 million from Air Force Research Lab to PsiQuantum to “rent” company’s barium titanate chipmaking capabilities (Breaking Defense)

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