Inside Quantum Technology

Quantum News Briefs August 27: Intellectual property tips for America’s Quantum Hub • Amazon Braket launches Rigetti Ankaa-2 superconducting device • Quantum coherence’ survives in ultracold molecules • Unconventional interface superconductor could benefit quantum computing

Sandra Helsel
IQT News — Quantum News Briefs

Quantum News Briefs takes a look at the latest news and announcements throughout the quantum R&D industry.

JDSupra: “Intellectual property tips for America’s Quantum Hub”

There is justifiably much excitement surrounding the quantum computing boom in Chicago. It is important, though, that innovators remember to prioritize intellectual property strategy when developing these new quantum technologies. Innovators, therefore, need to understand three key challenges and develop sound intellectual property strategies to overcome them. Andrew Velzen of McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP has writes on JDSupra that “seeking patent protection within the quantum space can be more complex and nuanced than seeking patent protection in other technical fields”. He provides an excellent description (summarized below) of those three IP challenges in his August 22 article in JD Supra.

1. The “abstract idea” barrier
Almost certainly the biggest challenge facing quantum patent applications is subject-matter eligibility. Patents protect inventions, and there are multiple requirements that must be satisfied.
Of most relevance for quantum technology, though, is that you cannot get a patent on anything that falls into a broad category of technologies classified as “abstract ideas.” This prohibition was cemented by the U.S. Supreme Court in the famous Alice case from 2014. [6] Since 2014, the exclusion of “abstract ideas” from patent protection has been the bane of countless software inventions. In the case of quantum technologies, this barrier makes it significantly more challenging to obtain a patent on purely algorithmic inventions, such as quantum computing algorithms that can be described in purely mathematical terms.

2. Collaboration and joint ownership
There are two particularly sticky situations that come to mind when considering quantum patents. The first is that large amounts of funding (especially in these nascent days of quantum computing) is coming from the federal government. When the U.S. government funds the development of an invention, it retains some rights to the invention.
The second situation occurs when multiple different entities are funding the research and development efforts (e.g., under a “joint research agreement”). Such a situation raises questions regarding who owns any resulting patent,

3. Buying time
One additional consideration for quantum innovators is time horizon. Issued patents last for 20 years from the filing date of the patent application. given the nature of quantum technology, it may be many years before the invention in question would ultimately find its way into a marketable product. As a result, it can be difficult for investors to make relatively expensive upfront decisions without much (or any) knowledge of the ultimate market for an eventual product.

AWS Quantum Technology blog: “Amazon Braket launches Rigetti Ankaa-2 superconducting device”

AWS  announced on its Quantum Technologies blog the addition of the Rigetti Computing’s latest 84-qubit Ankaa-2 superconducting quantum processor to Amazon Braket, its quantum computing service. In  recent AWS Quantum Technologies blog, Zia Mohammad and Tim Chen introduce the Ankaa-2 device, highlighting its capabilities and demonstrating how users can leverage this new hardware for enhanced quantum computing experiments.
Unlike other devices on Amazon Braket which can be limited in availability, Ankaa-2 can execute customer circuits throughout the day. This means that customers in any time zone can run quantum tasks and hybrid jobs at their convenience, opening up new possibilities for uninterrupted experiments and a more efficient use of quantum hardware resources, all on a pay-as-you-go basis. In this post, we will introduce the Rigetti Ankaa-2 device and show some sample code to get you started.
Ankaa-2 is designed to deliver improved gate operation times and increased median two-qubit gate fidelities. The qubits on the Ankaa-2 chip are arranged in a square lattice (Figure 1) so that each qubit is designed to have four nearest neighbors allowing for a more efficient mapping of applications to the device layout. More information and up-to-date characterization data can be found on the Ankaa-2 device details page in the Amazon Braket Console.
Ankaa-2 on Braket can execute quantum circuits throughout the day, meaning you can run quantum tasks and hybrid jobs at your convenience. To get started, visit the Amazon Braket console to view the device topology, get up-to-date calibration information about single and two-qubit gate fidelities, native gate support, and to view readout fidelities.

NSF news release reports: “‘Quantum coherence’ survives in ultracold molecules”

A news article provided by  National Science Foundation (NSF) on August 26 reports that scientists have demonstrated that quantum coherence can survive in a chemical reaction with ultracold molecules. Researchers’ findings highlight the potential of harnessing chemical reactions for applications in quantum information science. This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Quantum coherence it the ability of particles to maintain phase relationships and exist in multiple states simultaneously. It’s akin to the parts of a wave being synchronized. But whether quantum coherence can persist through a chemical reaction, where bonds break and form, has been questioned.
Scientists are using sophisticated laser techniques to research quantum entanglement between the states of a chemical reaction. Quantum entanglement is a key concept at the heart of quantum information science, whereby two particles can occupy a shared quantum state.
“Our findings precede the study of coherence in reactions under wet and warm conditions, which may be of interest for a wide range of chemical phenomena, including in the brain,” write Kang-Kuen Ni of Harvard University and co-authors.

UC Riverside reports: “Unconventional interface superconductor could benefit quantum computing”

A multi-institutional team of scientists in the United States, led by physicist Peng Wei at the University of California, Riverside, has developed a new superconductor material that could potentially be used in quantum computing and be a candidate “topological superconductor” as per UC Riverside information office August 22.A topological superconductor uses a delocalized state of an electron or hole (a hole behaves like an electron with positive charge) to carry quantum information and process data in a robust manner.
The researchers report today in Science Advances that they combined trigonal tellurium with a surface state superconductor generated at the surface of a thin film of gold. The researchers observed quantum states at the interface that host well-defined spin polarization. The spin polarization allows the excitations to be potentially used for creating a spin quantum bit — or qubit..
The researchers observed that the interface superconductor undergoes a transition under a magnetic field and becomes more robust at high field compared with low field, which suggests a transition into a “triplet superconductor,” which is more stable under a magnetic field.
Furthermore, through collaboration with scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the researchers showed that such a superconductor involving heterostructure gold and niobium thin films naturally suppresses decoherence sources from material defects such as niobium oxides that are a common challenge for niobium superconductors. They showed that the superconductor can be made into high-quality low-loss microwave resonators with a quality factor reaching 1 million.
Unlike previous methods that require magnetic materials, the researchers’ new approach uses non-magnetic materials for a cleaner interface.

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