Quantum News Briefs August 26: Multiverse Computing releases new version of Singularity SDK for portfolio optimization with quantum computing, Linux Foundation & World Bank launch free quantum computing training, Winners of IBM Quantum Awards: Open Science Awards 2022

Multiverse Computing Releases New Version of Singularity SDK for Portfolio Optimization with Quantum Computing

Multiverse Computing has introduced the newest version of Singularity Portfolio Optimization (v 1.2). This release includes the highly efficient Multiverse Hybrid Solver that combines the strength of classical and quantum computing and is specifically suited to portfolio optimization problems. Quantum News Briefs summarizes below.

• The Multiverse Hybrid, recommended for best results
• The D-Wave Leap Hybrid
• A classical solver, meant for benchmarking purposes for advanced users

Linux Foundation and World Bank Launch Free Quantum Computing Training

The Linux Foundation, in partnership with the World Bank, has released a new, free, online training course, Fundamentals of Quantum Computing, in partnership with the World Bank. The course provides an understanding on how quantum computing could be used for complex decision making far beyond current computer capabilities, as well as an understanding of the technological, governmental, and industrial implications as the technology further matures.
Fundamentals of Quantum Computing is available for immediate, free registration. The course can be accessed both on the World Bank Group’s OLC and the Linux Foundation Training Platform.
The Linux Foundation has been providing access to online training and education since 2014 and offers a full course catalog across a dozen categories with 100+ course offerings to meet a growing demand around the world. At the same time, the World Bank Group’s Open Learning Campus (OLC) serves to accelerate development solutions by transforming global knowledge into actionable learning.
The new course takes approximately three hours to complete, making it accessible to anyone. It will be of particular interest for public sector leaders, Chief Information Officers (CIOs), and technology teams in charge of the planning, design, development and deployment of public service delivery and digital economy infrastructures and platforms. Learners should be generally familiar with how computers function and the current use of on-premise and cloud computing.

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UNM Receives NSF Award to Further Quantum Science and Engineering Research

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded researchers at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and the University of Delaware (UD) an EPSCoR (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) Track 2 grant for $4 million to advance quantum photonic technology research and to establish a quantum science and engineering graduate program at UNM. Quantum News Briefs summarizes the announcement from the UNM News room.
The award, Laying the Foundation for Scalable Quantum Photonic Technologies is led by principal investigator Ganesh Balakrishnan, director of NM EPSCoR and professor of electrical and computer engineering at UNM, in collaboration with UNM investigators Tara Drake, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, Terefe Habteyes, associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology, and Marek Osinski, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering, alongside faculty at UD. The research will be based in the Center for High Technology Materials at UNM. UNM Vice President for Research, Ellen Fisher praised the new award as exceptionally timely.
The new graduate program will be modeled after UD’s QSE program. The recently-established UD program has proved wildly successful, taking an approach that introduces students to quantum mechanics and information processing fundamentals through hands-on, project-based learning. A portion of the UNM funding will support Native American students with assistantships in quantum photonics research to explore career opportunities in quantum sciences.

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Riken Researchers Demonstrate Error Correction in a Silicon Qubit System

Researchers from RIKEN in Japan have achieved a major step toward large-scale quantum computing by demonstrating error correction in a three-qubit silicon-based quantum computing system. This work, published in Nature, could pave the way toward the achievement of practical quantum computers.
One important challenge today is choosing what systems can best act as “qubits”—the basic units used to make quantum calculations. Different candidate systems have their own strengths and weaknesses. Some of the popular systems today include superconducting circuits and ions, which have the advantage that some form of error correction has been demonstrated. Silicon-based quantum technology, which has only begun to be developed over the past decade, is known to have an advantage in that it utilizes a semiconductor nanostructure similar to what is commonly used to integrate billions of transistors in a small chip, and therefore could take advantage of current production technology.
However, one major problem with the silicon-based technology is that there is a lack of technology for error connection
In the current research, conducted by researchers at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and the RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing, the group achieved this feat, demonstrating full control of a three-qubit system (one of the largest qubit systems in silicon), thus providing a prototype for the first time of quantum error correction in silicon. They achieved this by implementing a three-qubit Toffoli-type quantum gate.
Seigo Tarucha, the leader of the research group, their “next step will be to scale up the system. We think scaling up is the next step. For that, it would be nice to work with semiconductor industry groups capable of manufacturing silicon-based quantum devices at a large scale.”

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IBM Quantum Awards: Open Science Awards 2022 Announced

The IBM Quantum team has announced the second annual IBM Quantum Awards: Open Science Prize. The contest promised a $40,000 award for the most-accurate simulation of a quantum Hamiltonian using one of two methods, plus a bonus $20,000 to the overall winner. Quantum News Briefs summarizes, click here for complete information.
The theme of this year’s challenge was quantum simulation. IBM asked competitors to simulate a Heisenberg model Hamiltonian for a three-particle system on the 7-qubit IBM Quantum Jakarta processor. The winning award went to the participants who were able to achieve the highest-fidelity simulation of the evolution of a known quantum state using a method called Trotterization breaks the evolution of systems up into smaller time pieces so that we can undertake operations that otherwise would not commute — in essence, it is an approximate way to overcome the uncertainty principle.Trotterization.

Open Science Prize 2021 winners
Winner using Qiskit Pulse:  Yufeng (Bright) Ye from MIT and Lingbang Zhu from Harvard University for using a combination of Trotterization optimization, RZX gate optimization, and error mitigation. Check out their winning submission on the Qiskit Community Github.
Winner using Qiskit Defaults: Tom O’Leary and Benjamin Jaderberg from the University of Oxford, and Abhishek Agarwal from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), London for their use of Incremental Structural Learning (ISL). Check out their winning submission on the Qiskit Community Github.
Overall winner
Tom O’Leary, Benjamin Jaderberg, and Abhishek Agarwal are our overall winners for the ISL solution.

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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.