Amazon’s Braket Supports D-Wave, IonQ, & Rigetti; Braket Name an ‘In-Joke’ for Physicists

(Reseller.co.nz) Amazon still isn’t trying to build its own quantum computers, but Amazon’s Braket is making other companies’ quantum computers available to cloud users via Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon Braket is a fully managed service that helps you get started with quantum computing. It has three modules, Build, Test, and Run. The Build module centres around managed Jupyter notebooks pre-configured with sample algorithms, resources, and developer tools, including the Amazon Braket SDK.
Braket currently supports three quantum computing services, from D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti. D-Wave makes superconducting quantum annealers, which are usually programmed using D-Wave Ocean software, although there is also an annealing module in the Braket SDK. IonQ makes trapped ion quantum processors, and Rigetti makes superconducting quantum processors.
In Braket, you can program both IonQ and Rigetti processors using the Braket Python SDK circuits module. The same code also runs on local and hosted quantum simulators.
The name Braket is kind of an in-joke for physicists. Bra-ket notation is the Dirac formulation of quantum mechanics, which is an easier way of expressing Schrödinger’s equation than partial differential equations. In Dirac notation, a bra <f| is a row vector, and a ket |f> is a column vector. Writing a bra next to a ket implies matrix multiplication