Quantum Advantage Tracker from IBM, Flatiron, and collaborators

This is a preview issue of Quantum Campus, which shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,800 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 Advantage Tracker

Researchers from IBM, the Flatiron Institute, BlueQubit, and Algorithmiq released a quantum advantage tracker — a platform-agnostic framework to collect, validate, and compare experimental results. The tracker allows users “to systematically monitor and evaluate promising candidates of quantum advantage and assess how these candidates stack up against the leading classical methods,” according to an announcement from IBM.

“We are demonstrating exciting new results that are challenging leading classical methods and we are now submitting these results to a community-driven advantage tracker. I look forward to seeing how both the quantum and classical simulation communities push science further and test these and other results for quantum advantage,” Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research, said.

The tracker and more details are available on GitHub.

U.S.-China quantum review

The federal government’s U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission released a report on the two countries’ competition in quantum research. The report highlights the impact of China’s centralized control of state-supported research, industry, and the Army, as it accelerates technologies’ integration into the military while simultaneously constraining market-driven innovation. It also explores China’s “highly secretive” approach to quantum research:

“China’s reported quantum breakthroughs often lack independent verification, blurring the line between genuine scientific progress and political signaling. This opacity may obscure the true maturity of China’s capabilities, heightening the risk of miscalculation about both its technological readiness and its underlying intentions.”

Read the full report.

Diamond-based quantum sensor

Princeton engineers led by Nathalie de Leon developed a diamond nitrogen vacancy centers-based quantum sensor capable of measuring correlated noise at nanometer scales. The team explained that the approach can reveal details about magnetic fluctuations in materials like superconductors and graphene with 40 times more sensitivity than previous methods.

This work was published in Nature.

Supramolecular simulations

Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic reported on the first quantum-based simulations of supramolecular interactions by modeling the behavior of a water dimer and a methane dimer. The calculations were run, in part, on 27 to 54 qubits of IBM’s Quantum System One and, in part, on a classical supercomputer. They proved to be as accurate as state-of-the-art classical simulations, deviating from such results by less than 1.000 kcal/mol.

This work was published in Nature Communications Physics.

Quickbits

• Electronic switching of topology in LaSbTe (Nature Materials)

• Scalable entanglement of nuclear spins mediated by electron exchange (Science)

• Selective excitation of a single rare-earth ion in an optical fiber (Optics Express)

Quantum Campus is edited by Bill Bell, a science writer and marketing consultant who has covered physics and high-performance computing for more than 25 years. Disclosure statement.