IBM Adds Qiskit Support for Alpine Quantum Technologies’ Ion Trap Quantum Technology

(HPC.wire) IBM announced its Qiskit QC development framework now supports ion trap technology from Austria-based start-up Alpine Quantum Technologies (AQT).
After years of percolating in the shadow of quantum computing research based on superconducting semiconductors, ion trap technology is edging into the QC mainstream.

Ion Trap Advantages
Whether ion trap technology will win a significant place among technologies vying for sway in QC is uncertain. It has some inherent advantages such as not requiring the extremely low temperature operating environment of superconducting semiconductor-based systems. Also, ion trap qubits have longer coherence times although gate switching is slower.
IBM announced the expanded Qiskit capability in a blog by Ali Javadi-Abhari, Paul Nation, and Jay Gambetta last week (Qiskit – Write once, target multiple architectures.) They wrote today’s QC ecosystem includes “a diverse set of experimental platforms and system builds quite different in various aspects to our own superconducting qubit devices. Hence, to truly accelerate research and development, we need a software framework that can be universally applied across the available qubit technologies.”

See related IQT article:
Quantum Computers in Innsbruck Now Support Qiskit as Quantum Software Tool