Quantum News Briefs April 24: Australian Strategic Policy Institute reports China is the leader in 37 out of 44 critical technologies; CSIS Report: Seven Critical Technologies for Winning the Next War Includes Quantum Sensing & Computing; Researchers from Israel & Abu Dhabi partnering to improve performance of superconducting quantum processor + MORE.
Australian Strategic Policy Institute reports China is the leader in 37 out of 44 critical technologies
The report, called the Critical Technology Tracker, examines 44 critical technologies spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas.
China’s global lead extends to 37 of the 44 technologies tracked, with the country excelling in defence and space-related technologies. Notably, China’s strides in nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles reportedly took US intelligence by surprise in August 2021. ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China, collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country, most often the US.
The quantum tech arenas analyzed by ASPI are: Quantum computing, PQC, quantum communications (including QKD), and quantum sensors. The USA leads in quantum computing and China leads in the other three quantum arenas according to this report.
Australia is in the top five for nine technologies, followed closely by Italy (seven technologies), Iran (six), Japan (four) and Canada (four). Russia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, France, Malaysia and the Netherlands are in the top five for one or two technologies. A number of other countries, including Spain and Turkey, regularly make the top 10 countries but aren’t in the top five.
One surprising finding of the report is that Iran has surpassed countries like Japan, Canada, France and Russia to secure its place in the top five in six critical technologies.
Click here to review the report’s findings.
CSIS Report: Seven Critical Technologies for Winning the Next War Includes Quantum Sensing & Computing
The next war will be fought on a high-tech battlefield. But which technologies will make a real difference? Where will the U.S. find a technological edge? This report identifies the 7 technologies that could make the difference in a fight against a near-peer adversary. Three are “sprint” technologies, where the U.S. should aggressively pursue advancement with considerable resources and focused commitment: quantum sensing and computing, biotechnology, and secure, redundant communications networks. Four are “follow” technologies, where the U.S. should support and shape efforts ongoing in the private sector: high-performance batteries, AI/machine learning, space-based sensors, and robotics. The consequences of failure on any of these technologies are tremendous—they could make the difference between victory and defeat.
Click here to read the PDF of the report.
Researchers from Israel & Abu Dhabi partnering to improve performance of superconducting quantum processor
They are achieving this goal by improving the performance of the basic computational units of a superconducting quantum processor.
The improved qubit, called a “tunable superconducting flux qubit,” is a micron-sized superconducting loop where the electric current can flow clockwise, counterclockwise, or in a quantum superposition of both directions.
These characteristics would allow the computer to be much faster and more powerful than a normal computer. In order to exploit the potential speed, the quantum computer must run several hundred qubits simultaneously without them unintentionally interfering with each other.
As an alternative to what exists in quantum processors today, superconducting flux qubits have important advantages. First, they are very fast and reliable; second, it can be simpler to integrate many flux qubits into a processor compared to currently available technology.
This research was conducted with funding from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF). Click here to read complete article.
Cornell researchers bring quantum error correction closer to reality
Thanks to some creative thinking, Yuri Lensky, a former Bethe/Wilkins/Kavli Institute at Cornell (KIC) postdoctoral fellow in physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), collaborating with Eun-Ah Kim, professor of physics (A&S), came up with a simple “recipe” that could be used for robustly computing with non-Abelian anyons, including specific instructions for executing the effect experimentally on devices available today.
Their paper, “Graph Gauge Theory of Mobile Non-Abelian Anyons in a Qubit Stabilizer Code,” written in collaboration with theorists at Google Quantum AI, published March 24 in Annals of Physics. Google Quantum AI researchers, together with Lensky and Kim, have proved the theory with a successful experiment as reported in a preprint publication, “Observation of Non-Abelian Exchange Statistics on a Superconducting Processor,” on the research-sharing platform arXiv.
“This two-dimensional state is interesting both from a quantum condensed matter physics perspective – it has some novel properties that are very special to 2D physics – and from a quantum information perspective,” Lensky said. “It’s something truly quantum, but it’s also potentially useful for quantum computation. It protects bits of quantum information by storing them non-locally, and our protocol allows us to compute with these bits.”
Kim explained the principle that animates non-Abelian anyons by holding out two identical one-pound barbells. When she crosses her arms, the identical barbells change positions, but as objects defined by classical physics, their state remains the same. They are interchangeable. Click here for complete article by Kate Blackwood at Cornell.
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.