Quantopticon

This post is next up in the series on dispelling myths surrounding quantum technologies and is about correcting the public misunderstanding that the quantum internet will replace the classical internet*. But what exactly is the quantum internet? The quantum Internet will coherently network together quantum devices, such as quantum sensors and quantum computers, stationed at various nodes, in order to derive quantum advantage – that is, to enable us to do things that are either impossible or intractable classically. One example of unlocking a new capability through the quantum internet is distributed quantum computing: the approach of harnessing multiple quantum compute cores at different locations to tackle complex problems within a reasonable timeframe. Another example is stringing quantum sensors coherently together to increase their sensitivity beyond the classical noise limit. The quantum internet will additionally serve as a means of unconditionally secure communication, providing the capability to detect potential eavesdroppers of the transmission. A key and very important resource that will power the quantum internet is entanglement. The latter will be distributed to the network nodes, not unlike electricity flows through the power grid to subscribers of a utility company. Remarkably, whereas connecting two classical computers leads to a doubling of the available computational power, entangling two quantum computers increases the computational potential they can access exponentially; hence adding only a few nodes to the network will scale the network’s potency very quickly indeed. So, the quantum internet will co-exist alongside the classical internet. It will consist of a hybrid architecture incorporating both classical and quantum channels, and will be further enhanced by integration with high-performance computing, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. *(No, you won't use it to send e-mails to your grandparents!)

More good news this morning: The U.S. Economic Development Administration has awarded a $500,000 Consortium Accelerator Award to the CQE-led #TheBlochQuantum Tech Hub to strengthen the consortium and attract additional capital. In recent months, The Bloch has partnered with the FBI Chicago to build first-in-the-nation partnerships aimed at securing our quantum assets; rallied quantum technologists and the financial sector around fraud detection; and partnered with quantum companies to offer no-cost access to the IonQ Aria quantum system via the qBraid platform. It has also collaborated with community colleges and industry partners to develop the future quantum workforce, and partnered with MxD to cohost a daylong symposium to explore the integration of quantum technology into manufacturing. “By supporting The Bloch Quantum, the EDA is advancing our efforts to enhance fraud detection, improve the energy grid, and accelerate drug development,” said Meera Raja, The Bloch’s interim regional innovation officer and the senior vice president of deep tech for P33. “The EDA’s award will accelerate industrial engagement in the region, adding to our momentum and putting us the closer to realizing the transformative potential of quantum technologies," said David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering in the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the director of the CQE. #TheBlochQuantum #EDATechHubs #TechHubs #MidwestQuantum #QuantumPrairie

3. Quantum computers have realistic potential to help to tackle climate change. True or false? 🤔 Build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes the greenhouse effect, whereas its diffusion into the oceans 🌊 causes acidification and reduced oxygenation. Removing these gas emissions is one obvious and direct way to break the vicious cycle. This can be done with a catalyst 🧪 for carbon fixation that sequesters airborne CO2 and converts it, for example, into methanol ⛽️. Quantum computers should be able to assist the process of finding such a chemical compound – by complementing calculations performed on classical high-performance computers. This should be possible once we scale to about 100,000 physical qubits. ⚛️ It is worth stressing that the problem will not be solvable entirely quantumly. Quantum computers will only slot into a key position in the iterative computational workflow to act as an accelerator ⏩. More specifically, they would propagate (or time-evolve) the quantum (Eigen)state of a chemical under investigation, whereupon a phase estimation algorithm would measure the developed phase, which in turn would serve to work out the activation energy barrier. But, you say, even with the exponential speed-up offered by quantum, the computation could, in principle, take as long as the age of the universe! 🪐 Could such a phase estimation algorithm actually run within a practical timeframe? ⏳ This depends on its implementation. The execution time can be reduced drastically – for example, by ensuring that the code is optimised or by judiciously selecting the quantity being measured 📏 (e.g. a function of the Hamiltonian, rather than the Hamiltonian itself). Making such tweaks can have a huge impact: using these methods, Prof. Matthias Troyer's group at ETH Zürich and Microsoft has demonstrated an acceleration of ~10 orders of magnitude, taking the runtime from a billion years down to 1 month! 🗓️ Verdict: TRUE ✅ Once quantum computers have a large enough physical qubit count, they are indeed likely to make a significant contribution to discovering an efficient catalyst to fight climate change with in the near future. Diagrams courtesy of the BBC and Matthias Troyer.