Who'll take the prize? Leaders assess different approaches to quantum computing

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.

The race is on

“My hope is that eventually, no one will ever have to think about physical qubits ever again,” Atom Computing’s Ben Bloom said this week, looking forward to an industry in which the approach taken to quantum computing is irrelevant to the typical researcher.

In the meantime, New Scientist talked to leaders at programs and companies around the world to compare the current state-of-the-art in neutral atom, trapped ion, and superconducting systems. Researchers at Atom, Alice & Bob, Microsoft, NVIDIA, IonQ, Rigetti, and PsiQuantum also weighed in.

Read the full story in New Scientist.

Digital-analog simulator

A team from Google, NIST, and several universities demonstrated a new type of digital-analog quantum simulator earlier this month. Running on 69 superconducting qubits, the team looked at the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, which describes the dynamics of topological defects, and other phase transition calculations.

The hybrid extends beyond the capabilities of existing quantum simulators by using a digital mode to define initial conditions and an analog mode to directly model interactions among the particles.

“We get a combination of flexibility and speed,” Trond Andersen of Google’s Quantum AI team told IEEE Spectrum, to “try and get the best of both worlds.”

The work was published in Nature.

Entangled phonons

Andrew Cleland’s team at the University of Chicago showed high-fidelity entanglement between the phonons in two acoustic wave resonators. The Cleland lab was the first to create and detect single phonons and the first to entangle two phonons, over the years.

“Phonons are quantum particles of sound,” postdoc Hong Qiao, said in a University of Chicago announcement. “A phonon is not an elementary particle. It’s the collective motion of maybe quadrillions of particles behaving together. This is macroscopic compared to other quantum systems where you are entangling single electrons, single atoms, single photons.”

The work was published in Nature Communications.

Long-range ordered states

The University of Cologne, IBM, and Harvard developed a new protocol for generating a simple long-range ordered state in which long-range entanglements are maintained across significant distances within the system. They ran the system on an IBM Quantum Eagle chip, using a common calculation in statistical mechanics as the test case to build long-range order across up to 54 qubits.

Read the paper in Nature Physics and a blog post from IBM describing the collaboration.

Quickbits

• QuEra announces $230 million in financing from Google, SoftBank, and others; will double headcount at Boston-area headquarters

• Rice and Texas A&M get $1.2 million grant from the Keck Foundation to study super-radiance and high-res imaging

• DARPA picks PsiQuantum and Microsoft in Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing program

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