'Upending national security?' Google weighs in

Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology from university campuses. We publish on Fridays and are always looking for news from researchers across the country. Want to see your work featured? Submit your ideas to the editor.

‘Minimizing the dangers’

Google’s Charina Chou, James Manyika, and Hartmut Neven took a deep dive on how quantum will impact the economy and “upend national security” in Foreign Policy magazine. In it, they say:

“In addition to large-scale data theft, economic disruption, and intelligence breaches, quantum computers could be used for malicious purposes such as simulating and synthesizing chemical weapons or optimizing the flight trajectories of a swarm of drones. As with AI, the possibility of misuse or abuse raises critical questions about who should control the technology and how to mitigate the worst threats. Policymakers will need to determine how to maximize economic and societal gains while minimizing the dangers. Finding the best ways to achieve this balance will require a rigorous debate within civil society and an understanding by the public of the technology’s potential gains and harms…

“Washington and its international partners will also need to establish strong supply chains for all the subsystems and components that go into quantum computing. Many of the necessary components are and will continue to be produced in disparate locations around the world…Individual countries may attain mastery of different pieces, but like-minded states will need to work together to assemble the full puzzle and keep it out of the reach of authoritarian states.”

Read the essay in Foreign Policy.

Signal boost

A team at Stanford significantly improved researchers’ ability to control and read the spin state of tin-vacancy qubits with recent work published in Physical Review X. Using a naturally strained center and high-fidelity microwave spin control, they were able to assess the qubit’s spin in a single reading with 87 percent accuracy.

Tin-based qubits have longer lifetimes and higher operating temperatures than many other platforms and are particularly interesting to scientists developing quantum internet applications.

Find out more in an announcement from Q-Next, DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center that includes Stanford.

Path percolation

Physicists at Northwestern and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute published a new path percolation-based strategy for optimizing quantum networks and making them more robust.

“Many researchers are putting significant efforts into building larger and better quantum communication networks around the globe,” said Northwestern’s István Kovács, the study’s senior author. “But, as soon as a quantum network is opened up to users, it burns down. It’s like crossing a bridge and then burning it down behind you. Without intervention, the network quickly dismantles. To tackle this problem, we developed a simple model of users. After each communication event, we added a fixed number of bridges, or links, between disconnected nodes. By adding a large enough number of links after each communication event, we maintained network connectivity.”

Read the paper in Physical Review Letters.

‘Inevitable and increasingly imminent’

Peter Barrett of a deep tech VC called Playground took issue with Jensen Huang’s recent predictions about quantum computing in the pages of MIT Technology Review. Barrett — who is invested in PsiQuantum and Phasecraft — says “Huang’s predictions miss the mark, both on the timeline for useful quantum computing and on the role his company’s technology will play in that future…useful quantum computing is inevitable and increasingly imminent. And that’s good news, because the hope is that they will be able to perform calculations that no amount of AI or classical computation could ever achieve.”

Barrett explores applications and progress in drug development and materials science to make his case.

Read the full article in Technology Review.

Quickbits

• Alice&Bob raises $100 million Series B (TechCrunch)

• Xanadu Quantum Technologies publishes scale model of a modular photonic quantum computer (Nature)

• Amazon publishes new methods for extracting superconducting resonator loss (Journal of Applied Physics)

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