Quantum News Briefs April 19: Quantum light source goes fully on-chip, bringing scalability to the quantum cloud; 15 significant ways quantum computing could soon impact socie.ty; Berkeley Labs’ Bert de Jong discusses the evolution of quantum technology development + MORE
Quantum light source goes fully on-chip, bringing scalability to the quantum cloud
Twente (Netherlands), and the start-up company QuiX Quantum has presented an entangled quantum light source fully integrated for the first time on a chip. Quantum News Briefs summaries the news announcement on the Keibniz U site.
“Our breakthrough allowed us to shrink the source size by a factor of more than 1000, allowing reproducibility, stability over a longer time, scaling, and potentially mass-production. All these characteristics are required for real-world applications such as quantum processors,” says Prof. Dr. Michael Kues, head of the Institute of Photonics, and board member of the Cluster of Excellence PhoenixD at Leibniz University Hannover.
Until now, quantum light sources required external, off-chip and bulky laser systems, which limited their use in the field. Their new development, an electrically-excited, laser-integrated photonic quantum light source, fits entirely on a chip and can emit frequency-entangled qubit states.
“Qubits are very susceptible to noise. The chip must be driven by the laser field, completely free from noise, requiring an on-chip filter. Previously, it was a major challenge to integrate laser, filter, and a cavity on the same chip as there was no unique material that was efficient to build these different components,” says Dr. Raktim Haldar, a Humboldt fellow in Kues’ group. The key was the ‘hybrid technology’ that sticks the laser made of indium phosphide, a filter, and a cavity made of silicon nitride and brings them together into a single chip. On the chip, in a spontaneous nonlinear process, two photons are created from a laser field. Each photon spans a range of colours simultaneously, which is called ‘superposition’, and the colours of both photons are correlated, i.e., the photons are entangled and can store quantum information. “We achieve remarkable efficiencies and state qualities required for application in quantum computers or the quantum internet,” says Kues.
“Now we can integrate the laser with other components on a chip so that the whole quantum source is smaller than a one-euro coin. Our tiny device could be considered a step towards quantum advantage on a chip with photons. . . The scientists also expect their discovery to help lower the production costs of applications. “We can imagine that our quantum light source will soon be a fundamental component of programmable photonic quantum processors,” says Kues. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Photonics. Click here to read news release in-entirety.
15 significant ways quantum computing could soon impact society
1. Breaking Current Encryption Schemes –Arthur Miller, equipifi
2. Better Securing Sensitive Data – Carl Pihl, TicketingHub
3. ‘Breaking’ The Blockchain – Adam Sandman, Inflectra Corporation
4. Modeling Chemical Reactions For Drug Development – Jeff Wong, EY
5. Enhancing Drug Discovery And Personalized Medicine – Mehmet Akcin, EdgeUno
6. Improving AI Capabilities – Phil Tee, Moogsoft
7. Optimizing Investment Portfolios- Dax Grant, Global Transform
8. Safe Computing Of Encrypted Data – Przemek Szleter, DAC.digital
9. Democratizing Generative AI – Buyan Thyagarajan, Eigen X
10. Enabling True Real-Time Reporting – Nicholas Domnisch, EES Health
11. 11. Discovering New Materials – Cristian Randieri, Intellisystem Technologies
12. Improving Weather Forecasting – Neelima Mangal, Spectrum North
13. Enabling Hyper-Personalized Shopping Experiences – Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster
14. Optimizing Traffic Flows – Avani Desai, Schellman
15. Combating Climate Change – Marc Fischer, Dogtown Media LLC
Each of the 15 categories has a paragraph of explanation by that author. Click here to read the article in-entirety
Berkeley Labs’ Bert de Jong discusses the evolution of quantum technology development
Dejong recently gave a deeply informative interview to ASCR Discovery; Quantum News Briefs summarizes below.
The Quantum Systems Accelerator is one of five Department of Energy Office of Science National QIS Research Centers funded to work on quantum research and development as part of the United States National Quantum Initiative. We’re focusing on scaling and building more-accurate quantum computers in three different types of technologies: superconducting qubits, trapped ions, and neutral atoms. We want to understand each platform’s challenges and find commonalities. It’s not just about building better qubits but also figuring out how to scale them up to many qubits.
The reality is quantum computers are still physics experiments at this point. And we do not fully understand these quantum computers. We have error models that describe what a quantum computer might do, but they’re not exact either. We may never get a perfect quantum computer. So we’re trying to learn how we can mitigate these errors on the hardware, software, and algorithms.
We also need to scale this up to an industrial level. IBM, for example, is providing access to lots of quantum computers. Their biggest system is about 433 qubits, and they are trying to build even bigger ones. We know that we cannot store an infinite number of ions in a trap for a trapped-ion quantum computer, so we must couple multiple traps.
I don’t expect quantum computing to be an isolated technology. Most of the work is at the interface with classical computers. One technological approach might be quantum computers as an accelerator, like GPUs for our largest HPC systems. For problems in chemistry and materials, for example, that are very hard to do on a classical computer, can we offload those to a quantum computer?
The other angle that comes in this mix is AI, but not all the computations that AI needs are something that a quantum computer is going to be good at. We need to use the strengths of each hardware piece to its full advantage.
We are learning a lot about the role of quantum in physics and in building chips. It might not be just that we have a classical computer and a quantum computer. We might get into a serious situation where the classical computer starts to look a lot more like a quantum computer because we’re just starting to integrate components that we have learned to harness as part of the quantum computing revolution. Click here to read the lengthy interview in-entirety.
SK Telecom finds a way to integrate globe’s various quantum cryptography communication networks
The Seoul-based wireless carrier said the discovery could lead to the linking of quantum cryptography technologies over different mobile phone networks. This could reduce the risk of hacking.
Quantum cryptography application to the telecom industry has been limited due to problems in connecting and operating communication networks across various systems of different operators and nations, SK Telecom said.
The company’s pan-network solution, whose veracity and viability has been affirmed by Korea’s state-backed National Information Society Agency, offers a way to make the technology available around the world.
The next step, the company said, will be the standardization of protocols, which it intends to do by sharing its work with telecom companies worldwide. Click here to read original article in-entirety.
Sandra K. Helsel, Ph.D. has been researching and reporting on frontier technologies since 1990. She has her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.