By Moein Malekakhlagh IBM Quantum, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research center Pushing for higher quantum volume, and reaching the thresholds necessary for error correction, requires extremely precise elementary single- and two-qubit gates. These gates are the quantum analogue of elementary operations in classical computation. For instance, NOT is a classical single-bit operation through which the…
By Eric Michiels As quantum systems scale up, high fidelity and high-speed qubit readout—without bulky components—is a critical success factor. An IBM Research Team led by Baleegh Abdo has demonstrated the proof-of-principle of a high-performance qubit readout motherboard, free from the disturbances of hardware like circulators and isolators. Reading out qubits is a huge challenge: stable…
By Ieva Čepaitė, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow Ground states of many-body quantum systems (especially systems made of spins) are cool – and I don’t just mean their temperature. Finding a system's ground state is often equivalent to solving a very hard optimization problem. Being able to prepare and manipulate such ground states is also incredibly important in understanding various quantum…
By Jerry Chow This op-ed has been reprinted from IET Quantum Communication . Classical computers just won't cut it when it comes to tackling the greatest challenges in biology and medicine. Even accurately simulating the relatively simple caffeine molecule, far simpler than DNA or even proteins, would take an impossibly large classical computer. That's why we need a paradigm shift in the field of…
Like many other physicists, we spent the past week in the APS March meeting, sitting in video conference rooms watching PowerPoints, wondering if we should maybe have joined a different video conference to watch a different PowerPoint, all while worrying about how our own presentation would go and hoping that our pet wouldn't make noise during it . But the dust is finally settling. Despite both…
By Petar Jurcevic and Ryan Mandelbaum It's easy, in principle, to build a quantum computer: just find a system that obeys the laws of quantum mechanics with properties that you can exploit in order to perform your computations. In practice, it's extremely hard to build a quantum computer; you need to be able to control that system. Several architectures have arisen as viable controllable quantum…
By Antonio Córcoles and Maika Takita It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a noisy quantum computer in possession of a good algorithm, must be in want of a fault-tolerant quantum error correcting code. Quantum information is fragile. More so than its classical counterpart. Modern methods of error correction in computer science rely heavily on redundancy: by increasing the amount of data in…
David McKay, Seth Merkel, Doug McClure, Neereja Sundaresan and Isaac Lauer A non-trivial issue when building a quantum computer is trying to answer a simple question: “how well does it work?” As with regular computers, measuring a quantum computer’s performance boils down to running a set of problems where we know the expected outputs. But the task doesn’t end there. Which problems should we run?…
By Pratiti Deb, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago and IBM Quantum Education Intern When my family and friends asked me what I do in the lab during the first year of my PhD, I had the singular pleasure of telling them that I shine lasers and apply microwaves to diamonds to study quantum mechanics at the atomic scale. But what do all those cool and (quite literally) shiny, words mean? You…
The quantum mechanics we learn in undergrad a nd even grad level classes often does not tell us much about the physics of what we actually observe in the laboratory. But why? Well for one thing, idealized quantum mechanic s doesn ' t deal with open quantum systems, those that interact with the actual environment —and this c hanges everything. Quantum mechanical states are so delicate that unless…
T he IBM Quantum team recently announced a community built, open-source computer automated design and analysis tool for hardware engineers and theorists working on quantum hardware . If you've ever tried to design quantum hardware or novel qubits on your own, you know that this process takes way too much work. I thought you might appreciate a taste of what this program is and how it works. State…