Quantum News Briefs December 2: France signs quantum technology deal with US; QuSecure’s Rebecca Krauthamer named one of industry’s most innovative women of the year in technology; Qubit Pharmaceuticals accelerates drug discovery with hybrid quantum computing + MORE
Quantum News Briefs November 2 begins with “France signs quantum technology deal with US” followed by “QuSecure’s Rebecca Krauthamer named one of industry’s most innovative women of the year in technology”. Third is “Qubit Pharmaceuticals accelerates drug discovery with hybrid quantum computing” + MORE.
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France signs quantum technology deal with US
The United States and France have signed a deal on quantum technology during the visit of President Emannuel Macron to Washington DC this week. The cooperation statement builds upon agreements signed in Paris in October 2018 and a 2021 Joint Statement on Science and Technology Cooperation that explicitly named quantum information science as an area where both sides endorsed continued research cooperation.
“The potential for quantum information science and technology to address pressing scientific questions for the benefit of humanity are endless,” said Dr. Arati Prabhakar, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Chief Science Advisor to President Biden, who signed the joint statement for the United States. “This statement shows a commitment between the United States and France to work together to reach our shared quantum goals, grounded in our shared principles.”
Dr. Sylvie Retailleau, Minister for Higher Education and Research, signed the joint statement for France. “The United States and France share the belief that Quantum Information Science and Technology will change deeply many sectors of our economy” said Retailleau. “This statement underlines our willingness to work towards common goals based on shared values.”
“The signing of the Joint Statement on Cooperation in Quantum Information Science and Technology between the United States and France is a huge step forward in advancing quantum technology,” said Georges-Olivier Reymond, CEO and founder of Pasqal. Click here for EENews article in-entirety.
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QuSecure’s Rebecca Krauthamer named one of industry’s most innovative women of the year in technology
QuSecure™, Inc., a leader in post-quantum cybersecurity (PQC), announced that Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) Rebecca Krauthamer has been honored in the 19th annual Stevie® Awards for Women in Business awards program as an award winner in the Most Innovative Women of the Year – Technology awards category.
The Stevie Awards for Women in Business is an international competition produced by the creators of the prestigious International Business Awards® and American Business Awards®. More than 1,500 nominations from organizations and individuals around the world from 27 nations were submitted to the awards this year. More than 200 business professionals made up the judging committees and determined the award winners.
Rebecca Krauthamer is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at QuSecure. She studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. In 2020 Ms. Krauthamer was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for her work in quantum computing and was recently named as one of the top 12 Women Shaping Quantum Computing. She serves on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Futures Council on Quantum Computing, as well as the drafting committee for the WEF cybersecurity and governance reports on “Transitioning to a Quantum-Secure Economy” and “Quantum Computing Governance Principles.” She co-founded and co-directs QuForce, a fellowship program that provides mentorship and grants to individuals from non-traditional backgrounds to work on research projects in quantum. Ms. Krauthamer also serves on the advisory board of the AI Ethics Journal and is a contributing member of the Newsweek Expert Forum. Previously she served as CEO of Quantum Thought, a venture studio for quantum computing applications.
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Qubit Pharmaceuticals accelerates drug discovery with hybrid quantum computing
By accelerating drug molecule simulation and modeling with hybrid quantum computing, startup Qubit Pharmaceuticals is significantly reducing the time and investment needed to identify promising treatments in oncology, inflammatory diseases and antivirals.
Qubit is building a drug discovery platform using the NVIDIA QODA programming model for hybrid quantum-classical computers and the startup’s Atlas software suite. Atlas creates detailed simulations of physical molecules, accelerating calculations by a factor of 100,000 compared to traditional research methods.
Founded in 2020, the Paris and Boston-based company is a member of NVIDIA Inception, a program that offers go-to-market support, expertise and technology for cutting-edge startups.
Qubit has one of France’s largest GPU supercomputers for drug discovery, powered by NVIDIA DGX systems. The startup aims for pharmaceutical companies to begin testing their first drug candidates discovered through its GPU-accelerated research next year.
“By combining NVIDIA’s computational power and leading-edge software with Qubit’s simulation and molecular modeling capabilities, we are confident in our ability to dramatically reduce drug discovery time and cut its cost by a factor of 10,” said Robert Marino, president of Qubit Pharmaceuticals. “This unique collaboration should enable us to develop the first quantum physics algorithms applied to drug discovery.” Click here to read original article by Craig Rhodes, Nvidia.
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Team of physicists present results on quantum systems exhibiting the behavior of a transversable wormhole
Kurt Riesselmann, Fermilab, described the work of a team of physicists from Caltech, Harvard, Fermilab, MIT and Google who recently presented results on a pair of quantum systems that exhibit the behavior of a traversable wormhole. Quantum News Briefs summarizes below.
The physicists, including Joe Lykken, head of the Fermilab Quantum Institute, realized the wormhole dynamics experimentally on Google’s Sycamore quantum processor. The work constitutes a step toward a larger program of experimentally testing models of gravitational quantum theory using a quantum computer.
The team prepared a highly entangled quantum system and directly measured physical observables of the system. Specifically, the team inserted a qubit into a quantum model of interacting particles — known as a Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev system — by means of coding it using quantum gates. They observed the information of the first SYK system emerging from the second SYK system, all on the same quantum processor. The dynamics of this process are seen to be consistent with behavior expected from a quantum system dual to a wormhole in a two-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime.
Joel Butler, chair of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society, and former spokesperson of the CMS experiment at CERN, who was not involved in this research, remarked, “The field of elementary particle physics welcomes innovative experimentation and testing that can achieve progress in fundamental physics challenges such as quantum gravity; this is an exciting prospect for applying discoveries in other areas of physics to test theories that had seemed for the longest time beyond experimental reach.” Click here to read original article in-entirety.
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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.
