Inside Quantum Technology - Get The Latest Quantum News & Events Here

This edition of The Quantum Dragon is in a superposition of being both a newsletter and a calendar. I wanted to make this a mashup of the 11th film in the franchise, in all honesty, but Freddy Krueger didn’t want to be anywhere near a firebreathing dragon. That’s understandable, if you’ve seen his franchise. We agreed, ironically, that a machete-wielding dragon is a bit silly.

This week’s IQT News:

• IQT News Roundup
• IQT Sunday Edition
• Conferences to Remember
• At Least Your Data Is Protected
• 7 Essential Financial Supports for Quantum Chemical Clusters & Quantum Life Science Clusters
• 7 Essential Financial Supports for Quantum Finance Broadly and for 1) Risk Modeling 2) Portfolio Optimization 3) Cryptography 4) Q-Day

This week’s The Premium Quantum Dragon (Substack):

• Qollab’s SABRE-Q
• Quantum Native’s Quantris
• Quandela’s Spin Qubits
• 122,000 Subscribers
• Lunate’s Boreas Solactive Quantum Computing UCITS ETF – Inc.

This week’s Friends of The Quantum Dragon (inline):

• Vendor dependency could become one of the biggest barriers to quantum readiness. by Simon Pamplin, CTO at Certes
• “a result that stands shoulder to shoulder with the best classical methods” by Kevin Rhee, CEO and founder of Qunova Computing
• “Testing system infrastructure must become the enabler for industrialization at scale.” by Raj Badoni, Chief Commercial Officer at OrangeQS

In this edition:

• Ask Yuval Boger’s The Superposition Guy’s Podcast
• Ask The Quantum Dragon
• Russ Fein’s Flatland
• IBM’s Lonely Nighthawk
• The Quantum Kid’s Glimpse into What DARPA Can See
• Yuval Boger’s Topological Qubits
• What should I steal?
• Let’s imagine a quantum light, which we’ll call a qu-light.
• Conferences to Remember
• At Least Your Data Is Protected
• Vendor dependency could become one of the biggest barriers to quantum readiness.
• “a result that stands shoulder to shoulder with the best classical methods”
• IBM is trying to scale to 1,000 qubits again.
• IBM will FINALLY, hopefully, link 2 processors.
• IBM has never missed a milestone. (giggle)
• A Peek Inside PsiQuantum’s Quantum Computer
• A Bill Nobody Wants to Pay.
• Quantum sensors might speed up trading?
• “Testing system infrastructure must become the enabler for industrialization at scale.”
• Quantum Noise Detector

Ask Yuval Boger’s The Superposition Guy’s Podcast

I’m going to look like the copycat, since I keep forgetting to publish “Ask The Quantum Dragon,” but I concede that Mr. Boger is more imaginative by training his on his podcasts, which I don’t recall seeing before. Besides, I was a guest on his 1st podcast as The Superposition Guy. Ask The Quantum Dragon started training at the same time as Ask Inside Quantum Technology, though.

Ask The Quantum Dragon

Just to prove I’m not full of bovine excrement, I published my announcement immediately after congratulating Mr. Boger. Yes, that’s what the above text is meant to be. From a certain point of view, you can now ask extended questions of one of his first two guests. I don’t remember fielding the famous dinner guest question, though, so I’ll reply now: Freeman Dyson.

Russ Fein’s Flatland

Now it’s Russ Fein beating me to the punch with a Flatland analogy in “How is Quantum Computing So Powerful?” I have a Flatland analogy in the queue for publication on January 5, so now I look thoroughly unimaginative. But I’m going to make the most of this. Please read Mr. Fein’s article first, so that when mine publishes you can focus on the analogy, not on what Flatland is.

IBM’s Lonely Nighthawk

Despite IBM rolling around a 3-chandelier mockup of System Two since 2023, let the record show that the latest installation, this one at Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), still has only 1 processor. Keep that in mind every time you see the mockup online or in person: not one System Two deployment actually looks like that.

The Quantum Kid’s Glimpse into What DARPA Can See

The Quantum Dragon has shared some of the skepticism and criticism surrounding Majorana 1 and 2, but Microsoft’s strongest defense, via interview, is having advanced to Stage C of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI). This video shows us that DARPA is looking at much more than an assortment of research papers and a couple of chips.

https://a.co/d/0i1fndcr

Yuval Boger’s Topological Qubits

Speaking of Microsoft’s Majorana 1 and 2, I just opened up “Quantum Bits” and discovered that I had coincidentally left my bookmark on the pages about topological qubits. No joke. That actually just happened. Further coincidentally, Mr. Boger alludes to the same controversies that I just did. The moral of the story is that you should read the book and then give The Quantum Kid a 2nd view.

https://a.co/d/07IJjYvD

What should I steal?

I’ve never seen the knapsack problem framed as a way to help burglars decide what to steal, but Dr. Constantin Gonciulea’s and Charlee Stefanski’s “Building Quantum Software in Python: A developer’s guide” pulls it off. Without doing the calculations, and without condoning stealing, I’m guessing the 8 kg of diamonds is worth taking.

https://a.co/d/0aci3p73

Let’s imagine a quantum light, which we’ll call a qu-light.

This is what Dr. Bob “The Godfather of The Quantum Dragon” asks us to do early on in “Dancing with Qubits.” Years after the first edition published, however, we no longer have to imagine this. Quantum light is already a thing, and it’s on its 2nd generation. Light Rider proposes it for security applications. Fun fact: CEO Anthony Lawrence used to work for the NSA.

IQT News (feat. The Quantum Dragon)

Conferences to Remember

Q+AI and PQC+IQT are getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, but their memories can stay with us. We are gathering as much multimedia as we can, not just from what we recorded, but from what our sponsors, speakers, and attendees recorded, as well. Obviously, nothing beats having been there in person, both professionally and personally. We know that more podcasts and photos are forthcoming, and we will share those as they publish.

Image generated by an AI model provided by Microsoft Copilot.

At Least Your Data Is Protected

A well-balanced team of adventurers found an entrance to The Quantum Dragon’s cave. As the article “The” indicates, there can be only one. Therefore, he can’t guard every entrance himself, and he can’t close any of them off, because he needs to be able to come and go. Protecting his entire cave infrastructure, therefore, is proving to be quite challenging.

Vendor dependency could become one of the biggest barriers to quantum readiness.

Following new guidance from CISA, the NSA, and Australian cyber agencies urging technology vendors to prepare for the transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), Simon Pamplin, CTO at Certes, provided this exclusive comment:

“The agencies are right to put pressure on vendors to prepare for post-quantum cryptography, but there is a much bigger problem here. What happens when the systems organisations depend on simply cannot be upgraded?

Many critical infrastructure operators are running legacy applications, industrial control systems and edge devices that were never designed with cryptographic change in mind. Some of these systems have been operating for decades, and replacing them is neither straightforward nor affordable. Organisations can have the best PQC migration plan in the world, but if they are waiting for dozens of suppliers to update their technology, they have very little control over when that migration will actually happen.

That dependency is particularly concerning when you consider harvest now, decrypt later. Sensitive data is moving through these environments today, and attackers don’t need to wait for quantum computers to become capable of breaking current encryption before collecting it.

We need to stop assuming that the answer to every security problem is to upgrade an application or replace a piece of infrastructure. We’ve spent the last 20 years concentrating on identities, applications and network perimeters, but the data moving between them still needs protecting when those controls fail.

Crypto agility has to become part of the architecture. Organisations need to be able to change the cryptography protecting their data without repeatedly rebuilding the systems underneath it. That gives them a way to reduce exposure now while they work through the much longer process of upgrading legacy infrastructure.

Vendor readiness matters, but organisations cannot afford to make the protection of their most sensitive data entirely dependent on somebody else’s upgrade schedule.”

“a result that stands shoulder to shoulder with the best classical methods”

Following the claim by Qunova Computing that it has demonstrated, with the help of its partners IBM and RIKEN, better computational results on a quantum computer than DMRG, TrimCI, and the Sample-based Quantum Diagonalization method, Kevin Rhee, CEO and founder of Qunova Computing, provided this exclusive comment:

“For industrial chemists, quantum computing has always been interesting, but the accuracy of the computations has not always met the required levels. On 4Fe-4S, one of the most demanding problems in chemistry, HI-VQE has now delivered a result that stands shoulder to shoulder with the best classical methods. That is what changes the conversation. Accuracy at this level, achieved reproducibly, is what allows quantum-enhanced chemistry to move beyond a handful of institutions and into the hands of more companies working on real design questions.”

IBM is trying to scale to 1,000 qubits again.

Condor never saw the light of day in 2023, and yet some folks still like to bring it up from time to time to say that IBM has 1,000+ qubits. Now IBM is hoping and praying that it can scale to 1,000+ qubits with Nighthawk, future tense, and there’s no mention of the leaps backward (Condor 1,000+ –> Heron 156 –> Nighthawk 120) it had to take to get there.

IBM will FINALLY, hopefully, link 2 processors.

After parading around a mockup of 3 linked “chandeliers” for the past 3 years, IBM hopes to finally connect 2 quantum processors in 2027. Not 3, mind you. Only 2. The good news is that fans of the nonexistent triple system will probably still be able to take selfies with it at various conferences, but that’s just speculation on my part.

IBM has never missed a milestone. (giggle)

IBM Quantum claims that it has never missed a milestone. I normally like to pick on Osprey in rebuttal but given the prior statement about finally linking 2 Nighthawks next year, let the record show that the goal was to link 3 Nighthawks this year. The lesson for you young folks out there is to keep revising your roadmaps, like IBM, so you never miss the current one.

A Peek Inside PsiQuantum’s Quantum Computer

To be fair, anything inside PsiQuantum’s warehouse-sized quantum computer is technically “inside” the system. In their case, I count the building, too. That said, this 35-second video looks inside an empty one of the 100 refrigerators, overlaid with some interesting exposition. Note that the safety equipment at PsiQuantum resembles a construction site instead of a laboratory.

A Bill Nobody Wants to Pay.

Sylvain Saurel’s AI & Quantum Computing Newsletter makes the point that the true cost of building large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers includes the cost of securing our existing infrastructure from them first. One could argue (he doesn’t) that PQC companies should be hosting recognition banquets for the quantum computer builders sending the most business their ways.

Quantum sensors might speed up trading?

We often read and hear about how quantum computers may benefit the financial sector, but here’s Infleqtion’s CEO, Matthew Kinsella, hinting at how quantum sensors might accelerate the transmission of trade orders. The poor saps using fiber optics may be transmitting 40% slower. Shall we anoint this “quantum transmission advantage”?

“Testing system infrastructure must become the enabler for industrialization at scale.”

Following the announcement that OrangeQS appointed Raj Badoni as Chief Commercial Officer to drive its next phase of growth, Mr. Badoni provided this exclusive comment:

“You can only scale what you can measure! Semiconductors and photonics chips industry taught me this as essential. Quantum industry is now evolving to similar point, and testing system infrastructure must become the enabler for industrialization at scale, rather than the bottleneck holding it back.”

Image generated by an AI model provided by Microsoft Copilot.

Quantum Noise Detector

Alan Ho and Prof. Michael Biercuk inspired the Resuscitated Quantum Bullshit Detector, but the original(?) has resurfaced on Bluesky. It’s back to reposting a simple “bullshit” or “not bullshit,” so The Quantum Dragon will continue to monitor for challenges, controversies, and debates under this new name from Dr. Bob Sutor.

• Dr. Craig Wright argues that since we have 0 logical qubits, the threat from cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQC) is effectively 0.