Honeywell Quantum Ready to Follow ‘Nature’s Qubits’ Where They Lead
(By Becky Bracken) Just a year after Honeywell launched its quantum division, its head of commercial operations, Brian Neyenhuis is excited about the surprises the lie ahead. Innovation is moving at breakneck pace and Neyenhuis is happy to be along for the ride.
Honeywell has made substantial progress over the past 12 months. “I can’t wait to see what we find next,” he told Inside Quantum Technology during a recent interview focused on Honeywell’s quantum trajectory.
Honeywell Quantum Solutions is out there with its trapped ion based System Model H1, working with some of the world’s biggest companies, like Merk, DHL and BMW trying to see what they can get it to do next.
And its suping up its systems, setting new performance records with their H1 system three times over the past year with a Quantum Volume (QV) sore of 512. Quantum Volume is one measure of system performance, which helps compare speed across technologies. Honeywell will continue to use QV as their measurement standard for the time being, Neyenhuis added.
‘Nature’s Qubit’
Neyenhuis, a physicist by training, says Honeywell’s trapped-ion approach gives the company “great advantage in the race to confirm what he calls “strong evidence” that quantum computing will work when put up against some of the world’s biggest problems.
“Trapped ions have a lot of great qubits given to us by nature,” he explained. Adding these naturally-occurring qubits offer the the highest fidelity and the best “path forward to scale.”
Honeywell refers to them as “Nature’s Qubit.”
Honeywell Quantum is currently focused on global industries like pharmaceuticals, data center, telecommunications, finance, and aerospace, among others.
Neyenhuis said right now his team is focused on partnering with companies with in-house quantum expertise. There are also third-party firms to can help companies tool up to turn the System Model H1 lose against their biggest challenges.
But while Honeywell continues to cast a wide net across industries, it’s the use cases that haven’t even been considered that are most exciting to Neyenhuis.
“Most of (quantum’s) specialties aren’t known, so we’re exploring use cases,” he said. “But it’s the ones that come out of left field that are the best.”
