Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,500 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.

House Oversight

The U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation held a hearing Tuesday on “Preparing for the Quantum Age: When Cryptography Breaks.”

The hearing focused on the impact of quantum cryptography on national security, economic leadership, cryptocurrency, and the quantum workforce, as well as espionage around existing quantum technology.

Asked what keeps him up at night, Qrypt’s CTO Denis Mandich said: “The scale of theft is extraordinary. My guess is that [China has] access to everything that we’ve already done.”

Other witnesses at the hearing included IBM’s Scott Crowder, the Government Accountability Office’s Marisol Cruz Cain, and Brown University’s Brenda Rubenstein.

Watch the entire hearing below.

Trapped-ion

The Department of Energy reviewed recent advances in trapped-ion computing technologies and techniques from its Quantum Systems Accelerator program. It included research on a trap chip capable of storing up to 200 ions, parallel gate operations in a trapped-ion system, using pulsed lasers to control and pair specific qubits, and new methods of making mid-circuit measurements. The research in the review was led by Cornell, Duke, Sandia National Labs, and University of Maryland.

Read the full review on the Quantum Systems Accelerator’s website.

Universal translator

Researchers at the University of British Columbia proposed a means of microwave-optical conversion using an ensemble of spin-bearing color centers strongly coupled to a resonator. The team calls it a “universal translator” in a university announcement. The silicon-based device could convert up to 95 percent of a signal with virtually no noise.

This work was published in npj Quantum Information.

Bosonic qubit

Canadian company Nord Quantique announced a bosonic qubit technology that includes multimode encoding. Running their in-house Tesseract code, which arranges the quantum state of the photons in a structure similar to a four-dimensional cube, they claim that they can protect against many types of errors like bit flips, phase flips, control errors, and leakage errors.

The company’s demonstration showed no measurable decay through 32 error-correction cycles.

Nord Quantique said that their mulitmode approach will allow for smaller systems that “consume a fraction of the energy [and lower the] requirements for cryogenics and control electronics,” according to an announcement. They plan to build their first utility-scale quantum computer with more than 100 logical qubits by 2029.

Quickbits

• Quantum computing in surgery and urology (Nature Reviews)

• Spin-qubit control with a milli-kelvin CMOS chip (Nature)

• Quantum Bootcamp launches at Central New Mexico Community College

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