In partnership with

Welcome to the Quantum Realm.

Enjoy today’s breakdown of news, research, & events within quantum.

🎉100th edition of the Daily Qubit and it’s a good one — (they’re all good though, right?) — dynamic cooling makes a comeback after discovering the previously calculated Shannon bound was too low, new Quantinuum algorithm for state preparation, $280 million quantum computing campus, Microsoft’s quantum endeavors pull out of the University of Sydney, and more.

🗓️UPCOMING

Sunday, July 21 |QTM-X Quantum Education Series 6 of 10: Quantum Hardware

Learn AI in 5 Minutes a Day

AI Tool Report is one of the fastest-growing and most respected newsletters in the world, with over 550,000 readers from companies like OpenAI, Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, and more.

Our research team spends hundreds of hours a week summarizing the latest news, and finding you the best opportunities to save time and earn more using AI.

Sign up with 1-Click

📰QUANTUM QUICK BYTES

⚛️ The NQCC & Infleqtion are pushing the UK’s quantum computing ecosystem ever forward: Infleqtion is now the first company to install a neutral atom quantum computer at the National Quantum Computing Centre under their testbed program. This installation is part of Infleqtion's effort to establish the necessary infrastructure and collaboration with the NQCC on quantum computing advancements. The company is also working with local partners on practical applications like traffic management and will participate in the UK Quantum Hackathon to mentor students and early career researchers.

🧪New Quantinuum quantum algorithm for noise-free state preparation in computational quantum chemistry: Quantum computing is particularly relevant to strengthening our understanding of chemistry, impacting fields from drug development to superconductors. One notable challenge is state preparation, which has faced significant optimization and scaling issues with traditional variational techniques. Adiabatic state preparation, an older method, offers speedups but introduces too much noise and requires many gates. In pursuit of a solution, Quantinuum researchers have developed an averaging approach, compatible with their advanced hardware, that eliminates the need for noisy time evolution, ensuring guaranteed convergence and suitability for near-term quantum computers.

💔Microsoft pulls quantum out of Australia: Microsoft has ended its quantum computing research at the University of Sydney, closing the Quantum Sydney facility and relocating efforts to its U.S. headquarters. Despite the closure, many researchers will remain in Australia to continue their work independently. The collaboration between Microsoft and the University of Sydney was fruitful for the quantum tech industry in Australia, including a major breakthrough in qubit control chip development in 2021. The University of Sydney will maintain a strong relationship with Microsoft on other projects and continue to support the growing quantum ecosystem in Australia. But, it’s not all closed doors: the federal and Queensland governments are heavily investing in the quantum sector, including investments in PsiQuantum to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer in Brisbane 👇️

🎒PsiQuantum partners with Queensland universities to grow skills and research initiatives: PsiQuantum has signed an MOU with five leading Queensland universities to create additional educational programs and research opportunities to encourage local talent in quantum computing and related advanced technology sectors. The partnership will support PsiQuantum's goal of deploying the first utility-scale quantum computer in Brisbane and aligns with Queensland's and Australia's national strategies to grow a skilled quantum workforce.

🤝DOE and DARPA sign an MOU to coordinate research and development: The U.S. Department of Energy and DARPA have signed an MOU to coordinate research and development efforts in quantum computing, including the planning and coordination of future activities susch as a deep analysis of quantum computing's current status and future directions. DOE will contribute its decades of experience in quantum research and high-performance computing, while DARPA will focus on creating a world-class verification and validation team for fault-tolerant quantum computers.

🛢️ Eni + ITQuanta = Eniquantic for energy optimization and innovation: Eni SPA and ITQuanta have established a joint venture, Eniquantic, to create a full-stack quantum computing system directed at improving energy systems from production to market trading. The system will use quantum computing to solve complex problems like mathematical optimization, modeling, simulation, and AI, supporting the energy transition and enhancing renewable energy production efficiency. Eniquantic will utilize Eni's HPC supercomputers to explore integrations between quantum and classical architectures and test energy-related algorithms. The joint venture is also focused on discovering new high-performance materials and optimizing operations across the energy value chain, including energy trading. Initially, Eni will own 94% of Eniquantic, with ITQuanta holding the remaining 6%.

🏢DARPA and Illinois to create a $280 million quantum computing campus in Chicago: The U.S. Department of Defense’s DARPA and the state of Illinois are collaborating to establish a major quantum computing campus in Chicago, with each investing up to $140 million. This initiative, named the Quantum Proving Ground partnership, will position Illinois as a leader in quantum computing and potentially generate $60 billion in economic impact as well as thousands of jobs. The campus will host both federal researchers and private companies to encourage collaboration in quantum research. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who has prioritized making the state a quantum technology hub, believes the project will drive advancements in various fields, including national security. The site, yet to be finalized, will feature advanced facilities like cryogenic labs for qubit manipulation.

☕️FRESHLY BREWED RESEARCH

DYNAMIC COOLING ON CONTEMPORARY QUANTUM COMPUTERS

QUICK BYTE: A return to the exploration of the dynamic cooling of qubits using ancilla qubits provides an exact formula for the minimum temperature achievable which is more efficient than previously thought. The practicality was confirmed through experiments on a real quantum processor with a three-qubit system.

PRE-REQS:

• NMR computerswere an early type of quantum computer that used the nuclear spins of atoms as qubits. While an important part of the early development of quantum computing, they were ultimately limited by scaleability and the need for low temperatures.

• The Shannon bound, named after the father of information theory himself, is a theoretical limit that can be used to quantify the maximum efficiency of data encoding. In terms of the paper, it’s used to quantify the upper cooling limit possible of a qubit manipulated by entropy in a closed system.

• An ancilla qubit is a qubit that is not primarily used for the holding and processing of quantum information, but rather in steps that support quantum computation, such as algorithms and error correction.

• The Mpemba effect is a phenomenon where, under certain conditions, a system at a higher initial temperature can reach thermal equilibrium faster than one at a lower initial temperature. Recent explorations of the quantum Mpemba effect have shown that a system at a lower initial temperature can reach thermal equilibrium faster than one at a higher initial temperature, under certain conditions.

SIGNIFICANCE: While the golden chandelier imagery of superconducting quantum computers runs rampant across the web, earlier modalities like the NMR quantum computers were the actual pioneers of the field. In NMR computing, qubits were cooled and manipulated directly with lasers. A team of researchers at the time explored the use of dynamic cooling by application of logic gates, but the method was ultimately discarded due to the calculated Shannon bound, which limited the potential cooling efficiency. Nevertheless, a team recently revisited the concept of dynamic cooling, where heating ancilla qubits cools other qubits within a closed system as recent findings have indicated that the Shannon bound for such an application is higher than previously thought.

The study analytically derived the minimum temperature achievable through dynamic cooling and revealed a crossover from slow, 1/√N scaling at high temperatures to much faster, 1/N scaling at low temperatures. In regards to cooling, a particularly interesting insight was that dynamic cooling was effective for qubits that initialized at higher temperatures. This aligns with the recent demonstrations of the reverse Mpemba effect in quantum systems, where a quantum system that begins at a higher temperature cools to thermal equilibrium faster than a comparatively cooler one.

In addition to the analytical portion of the study, the experimental demonstration involved cooling on a three-qubit system using a real quantum processor, and showed that suboptimal cooling algorithms can drastically reduce circuit complexity while sacrificing minimal cooling efficiency.

RESULTS:

• Provides an exact formula for the minimum temperature achievable for the target qubit

• Work required for cooling scales linearly with the number of qubits and is exponentially more advantageous in the low-temperature regime

• Successfully demonstrated on a real quantum processor with a three-qubit system, showing practical viability

• Important to note that of now, scaling to larger systems poses challenges due to rapid circuit growth

• Future research inspiration: optimizing unitary operations to achieve minimal circuit complexity

HONORABLE RESEARCH MENTIONS:

A presented optimization approach improves the efficiency and throughput of quantum hardware by scheduling multiple quantum circuits for parallel execution while maintaining high fidelity. It introduces an integer linear programming formulation and a greedy heuristic method to maximize the number of circuits executed simultaneously on hardware devices like IBM's 27-qubit and 127-qubit systems, achieving 2× and 3× better utilization, respectively. —> link to paper

Quantum Bayes Classifiers are designed for image classification tasks, implementing both naïve and seminaïve variants. Using local feature sampling and simulating these QBCs on the MindQuantum platform, the study demonstrates that QBCs can achieve high classification accuracy on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets and surpass classical Bayesian networks and quantum neural networks in some cases. —> link to paper

A digital-analog quantum genetic algorithm using Rydberg atom arrays combines digital single-qubit operations with analog global interactions. This hybrid approach uses the high fidelity of analog operations and the flexibility of digital gates to estimate ground-state energies of molecules like H2, LiH, and BeH2, achieving errors below 1% and high state overlaps. —> link to paper

The interaction between single germanium-vacancy centers in diamond and an open microcavity at cryogenic temperatures achieves a reduction in the excited-state lifetime due to the Purcell effect. By exploiting the tunability of the microcavity system, the study demonstrates favorable optical properties of GeV defects, achieving a lifetime reduction factor of up to 4.5 and coherent-coupling rates up to 360 MHz, which highlights the potential of GeV defects for future quantum networking applications. —> link to paper

UNTIL TOMORROW.