Zooming ahead? DIA's assessment of quantum research in China

This is a preview issue of Quantum Campus, which shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,700 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.

Threat analysis

In a brief Global Security newsletter item, Politico’s Joe Gould highlighted findings from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the European Centre for International Political Economy on China’s quantum progress. DIA’s annual threat analysis to Congress claimed “China and Russia both unveiled new higher performance quantum computers and continued expanding their quantum communications networks” but argued that Chinese quantum decryption capabilities likely won’t emerge before the 2030s. The ECIPE report, meanwhile, put Chinese quantum investments at three to four times that of the United States.

Infleqtion

Infleqtion released initial details of its next-generation neutral atom architecture and its updated technology roadmap on Wednesday. The company projected that it will release a full-stack fault-tolerant system based on the architecture with more than 1,000 logical qubits by 2030. They also claimed to have executed a simplified version of Shor’s algorithm on an early version of the platform. The company will host a webinar on the architecture next week.

Read the announcement from Infleqtion. The company also released a technical report on the work.

New noise model

A team at Rice University developed a set of algorithms using a new model of quantum noise that accounts for both random error and the possibility of targeted interference. “Our model is strong in the sense that it also considers nonphysical and potentially malicious factors that may affect the system,” Nai-Hui Chia, a professor at Rice, said. “Our goal here was to see if we could design a good algorithm to certify devices or do other tasks such that we would be secure against a deliberate attack.”

This work will be presented at 66th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.

Engineers at New York University demonstrated a new fabrication approach that addresses the fact that many superconductors are difficult to pattern into functional devices using conventional chemistry-based methods. The team showed the viability of instead using low-energy ion beam etching. They validated the approach with superconducting resonators fashioned from niobium and showed that resulting devices had comparable performance to those made with chemistry-based methods.

This work was published in Applied Physics Letters. NYU also released an announcement about the research.

Quickbits

• Booz Allen and SEEQC to build superconducting quantum computers for government and commercial markets

• Ultracold cryogenic TEM with liquid helium and high stability (PNAS)

• Maryland Quantum-Thermodynamics Hub Secures Funding for Three More Years with State, Corporate, and Philanthropic Support

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.