Quantum

IBM and University of Tokyo Demonstrate Krylov Quantum Diagonalization on 56-Site Many-Body System Using Heron Processor

Mohamed Abdel-Kareem — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 13:40:32 +0000

Researchers from The University of Tokyo and IBM have demonstrated Krylov Quantum Diagonalization (KQD) on an IBM Heron quantum processor, successfully simulating the Heisenberg model on a 2D heavy-hex lattice of up to 56 sites. This experiment represents the simulation of one of the largest many-body systems achieved on a quantum processor to date. The [...]

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Quantum Dice and Astute Group Announce Global Distribution Partnership for Quantum Random Number Generator Chip Products

Mohamed Abdel-Kareem — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 13:12:48 +0000

Quantum Dice, a University of Oxford spin-out specializing in quantum random number generator (QRNG) technology, and Astute Group, a global electronics distributor and supply chain partner, have announced a strategic global distribution partnership. As part of this agreement, Astute Group has joined Quantum Dice’s authorized partner program to accelerate access to its DISC™-protected QRNG chip [...]

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Qunnect Secures $10 Million Series A Extension for Quantum Networking Development

Mohamed Abdel-Kareem — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 12:56:34 +0000

Qunnect, a company deploying quantum entanglement-based protocols over commercial fiber, has closed an oversubscribed Series A extended financing round, securing $10 million. The round was led by Airbus Ventures, with additional participation from Cisco Investments and Quantonation. This new funding is designated to fuel the development of turn-key variants of Qunnect's Carina product suite, enabling [...]

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Global Data Quantum Adds Quantum Portfolio Optimizer to IBM Qiskit Functions Catalog

Mohamed Abdel-Kareem — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 12:29:41 +0000

Global Data Quantum, a Spanish company, has added its Quantum Portfolio Optimizer software to IBM's Qiskit Functions Catalog. This new application function was introduced at the IBM Quantum Partner Forum 2025 in London, enabling finance professionals to leverage quantum computing resources for investment strategy backtesting and dynamic portfolio optimization. This addition expands the catalog's offerings, [...]

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Quantum computers just got an upgrade – and it’s 10× more efficient

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 05:58:18 +0000

Chalmers engineers built a pulse-driven qubit amplifier that’s ten times more efficient, stays cool, and safeguards quantum states—key for bigger, better quantum machines.

Q-CTRL’s Fire Opal Integrated with Rigetti’s Ankaa-3, Demonstrating Significant Performance Boosts

Mohamed Abdel-Kareem — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 20:38:08 +0000

Q-CTRL, a provider of quantum infrastructure software, has announced the availability of its Fire Opal performance management software on Rigetti's latest 84-qubit Ankaa-3 quantum computer, accessible via the Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services (QCS) platform. This integration addresses the challenge of error suppression in quantum computing, enhancing the usability and capabilities of Rigetti's superconducting hardware. Fire [...]

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IBM Delivers Quantum System Two to RIKEN in Japan, Integrating with Fugaku Supercomputer

Mohamed Abdel-Kareem — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 05:19:27 +0000

IBM and RIKEN, a national research laboratory in Japan, have unveiled the first IBM Quantum System Two to be deployed outside of the United States. Located in Kobe, Japan, the system is notably the first quantum computer to be co-located with RIKEN's Fugaku supercomputer, one of the world's most powerful classical systems. This deployment, a [...]

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Raymond Laflamme (1960-2025)

Scott — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 05:04:49 +0000

Even with everything happening in the Middle East right now, even with (relatedly) everything happening in my own family (my wife and son sheltering in Tel Aviv as Iranian missiles rained down), even with all the rather ill-timed travel I’ve found myself doing as these events unfolded (Ecuador and the Galapagos and now STOC’2025 in Prague) … there’s been another thing, a huge one, weighing on my soul.

Ray Laflamme played a major role in launching the whole field of quantum computing and information, and also a major role in launching my own career. The world has lost him too soon. I’ve lost him too soon.

After growing up in Quebec—I still hear his French-Canadian accent, constantly on the verge of laughter, as I’m writing this—Ray went into physics and became a PhD student of Stephen Hawking. No, not a different Stephen Hawking. If you’ve read or watched anything by or about Hawking, including A Brief History of Time, you might remember the story where Hawking believed for a while that time would reverse itself as the universe contracted in a Big Crunch, with omelettes unscrambling themselves, old people turning into children, etc. etc., but then two graduate students persuaded him that that was totally wrong, and entropy would continue to increase like normal. Anyway, Ray was one of those students (Don Page was the other). I’d always meant to ask Ray to explain what argument changed Hawking’s mind, since the idea of entropy decreasing during contraction just seemed obviously wrong to me! Only today, while writing this post, did I find a 1993 paper by Hawking, Laflamme, and Lyons that explains the matter perfectly clearly, including three fallacious intuitions that Hawking had previously held. (Even though, as they comment, “the anatomy of error is not ruled by logic.”)

Anyway, in the mid-1990s, starting at Los Alamos National Lab and continuing at the University of Waterloo, Ray became a pioneer of the then-new field of quantum computing and information. In 1997, he was a coauthor of one of the seminal original papers that proved the possibility of fault-tolerant quantum computation with a constant error rate, what we now call the Threshold Theorem (Aharonov and Ben-Or had such a result independently). He made lots of other key early contributions to the theory of quantum error-correcting codes and fault-tolerance.

When it comes to Ray’s scientific achievements after his cosmology work with Hawking and after quantum fault-tolerance—well, there are many, but let me talk about two. Perhaps the biggest is the KLM (Knill-Laflamme-Milburn) Theorem. It would be fair to say that KLM started the entire field of optical or photonic quantum computation, as it’s existed in the 21^st century. In one sentence, what KLM showed is that it’s possible to build a universal quantum computer using only

identical single-photon states,
a network of “linear-optical elements” (that is, beamsplitters and phaseshifters) that the photons travel through, and
feedforward measurements—that is, measurements of an optical mode that tell you how many photons are there, in such a way that you can condition (using a classical computer) which optical elements to apply next on the outcome of the measurement.

All of a sudden, there was a viable path to building a quantum computer out of photons, where you wouldn’t need to get pairs of photons to interact with each other, which had previously been the central sticking point. The key insight was that feedforward measurements, combined with the statistical properties of identical bosons (what the photons are), are enough to simulate the effect of two-photon interactions.

Have you heard of PsiQuantum, the startup in Palo Alto with a $6 billion valuation and hundreds of employees that’s right now trying to build an optical quantum computer with a million qubits? Or Xanadu, its competitor in Toronto? These, in some sense, are companies that grew out of a theorem: specifically the KLM Theorem.

For me, though, the significance of KLM goes beyond the practical. In 2011, I used the KLM Theorem, together with the fact (known since the 1950s) that photonic amplitudes are the permanents of matrices, to give a new proof of Leslie Valiant’s celebrated 1979 theorem that calculating the permanent is a #P-complete problem. Thus, as I pointed out in a talk two years ago at Ray’s COVID-delayed 60^th birthday conference, entitled Ray Laflamme, Complexity Theorist (?!), KLM had said something new about computational complexity, without any intention of doing so. More generally, KLM was crucial backdrop to my and Alex Arkhipov’s later work on BosonSampling, where we gave strong evidence that some classical computational hardness—albeit probably not universal quantum computation—remains in linear optics, even if one gets rid of KLM’s feedforward measurements.

(Incidentally, I gave my talk at Ray’s birthday conference by Zoom, as I had a conflicting engagement. I’m now sad about that: had I known that that would’ve been my last chance to see Ray, I would’ve cancelled any other plans.)

The second achievement of Ray’s that I wanted to mention was his 1998 creation, again with his frequent collaborator Manny Knill, of the One Clean Qubit or “DQC1” model of quantum computation. In this model, you get to apply an arbitrary sequence of 2-qubit unitary gates, followed by measurements at the end, just like in standard quantum computing—but the catch is that the initial state consists of just a single qubit in the state |0⟩, and all other qubits in the maximally mixed state. If all qubits started in the maximally mixed state, then nothing would ever happen, because the maximally mixed state is left invariant by all unitary transformations. So it would stand to reason that, if all but one of the qubits start out maximally mixed, then almost nothing happens. The big surprise is that this is wrong. Instead you get a model that, while probably not universal for quantum computation, can do a variety of things in polynomial time that we don’t know how to do classically, including estimating the traces of exponentially large unitary matrices and the Jones polynomials of trace closures of braids (indeed, both of these problems turn out to be DQC1-complete). The discovery of DQC1 was one of the first indications that there’s substructure within BQP. Since then, the DQC1 model has turned up again and again in seemingly unrelated investigations in quantum complexity theory—way more than you’d have any right to expect a priori.

Beyond his direct contributions to quantum information, Ray will be remembered as one of the great institution-builders of our field. He directed the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo in Canada, from its founding in 2002 until he finally stepped down in 2017. This includes the years 2005-2007, when I was a postdoc at IQC—two of the most pivotal years of my life, when I first drove a car and went out on dates (neither of which I do any longer, for different reasons…), when I started this blog, when I worked on quantum money and learnability of quantum states and much more, and when I taught the course that turned into my book Quantum Computing Since Democritus. I fondly remember Ray, as my “boss,” showing me every possible kindness. He even personally attended the Quantum Computing Since Democritus lectures, which is why he appears as a character in the book.

As if that wasn’t enough, Ray also directed the quantum information program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). If you ever wondered why Canada, as a nation, has punched so far above its weight in quantum computing and information for the past quarter-century—Ray Laflamme is part of the answer.

At the same time, if you imagine the stereotypical blankfaced university administrator, who thinks and talks only in generalities and platitudes (“how can we establish public-private partnerships to build a 21^st-century quantum workforce?”) … well, Ray was whatever is the diametric opposite of that. Despite all his responsibilities, Ray never stopped being a mensch, a friend, an intellectually curious scientist, a truth-teller, and a jokester. Whenever he and I talked, probably at least a third of the conversation was raucous laughter.

I knew that Ray had spent many years battling cancer. I naïvely thought he was winning, or had won. But as so often with cancer, it looks like the victory was only temporary. I miss him already. He was a ray of light in the world—a ray that sparkles, illuminates, and as we now know, even has the latent power of universal quantum computation.

UK Government Commits £670 Million ($908.6 Million USD) Over 10 Years to Advance Quantum Computing Capabilities

Mohamed Abdel-Kareem — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 04:27:41 +0000

The UK government has announced a landmark £670 million ($908.6 million USD) investment dedicated to accelerating the application of quantum computing over the next decade. This substantial commitment is a cornerstone of the newly published Digital and Technologies Sector Plan, integral to the government's modern Industrial Strategy aimed at driving national renewal and fostering sustained [...]

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Quantum Computing Inc. Secures $200 Million Through Private Placement of Common Stock to Accelerate Commercialization

Mohamed Abdel-Kareem — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 02:13:58 +0000

Quantum Computing Inc. (QCi) (Nasdaq: QUBT) has entered into securities purchase agreements with institutional investors for a private placement of 14,035,089 shares of common stock at a price of $14.25 per share, aiming to raise gross proceeds of $200 million. The offering, with Titan Partners Group acting as the sole placement agent, is expected to [...]

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QNu Labs Launches QNu Academy to Train Workforce for India’s National Quantum Mission

Mohamed Abdel-Kareem — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 19:54:00 +0000

QNu Labs has launched QNu Academy, an educational initiative designed to develop quantum cybersecurity talent aligned with India’s National Quantum Mission. The program offers structured training in Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), Quantum Random Number Generation (QRNG), and Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), combining self-paced learning with instructor-led modules and hands-on labs. The curriculum has been developed in [...]

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Trump and Iran, by popular request

Scott — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 12:59:32 +0000

I posted this on my Facebook, but several friends asked me to share more widely, so here goes:

I voted against Trump three times, and donated thousands to his opponents. I’d still vote against him today, seeing him as a once-in-a-lifetime threat to American democracy and even to the Enlightenment itself.

But last night I was also grateful to him for overruling the isolationists and even open antisemites in his orbit, striking a blow against the most evil regime on the planet, and making it harder for that regime to build nuclear weapons. I acknowledge that his opponents, who I voted for, would’ve probably settled for a deal that would’ve resulted in Iran eventually getting nuclear weapons, and at any rate getting a flow of money to redirect to Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

May last night’s events lead to the downfall of the murderous ayatollah regime altogether, and to the liberation of the Iranian people from 46 years of oppression. To my many, many Iranian friends: I hope all your loved ones stay safe, and I hope your great people soon sees better days. I say this as someone whose wife and 8-year-old son are right now in Tel Aviv, sheltering every night from Iranian missiles.

Fundamentally, I believe not only that evil exists in the world, but that it’s important to calibrate evil on a logarithmic scale. Trump (as I’ve written on this blog for a decade) terrifies me, infuriates me, and embarrasses me, and through his evisceration of American science and universities, has made my life noticeably worse. On the other hand, he won’t hang me from a crane for apostasy, nor will he send a ballistic missile to kill my wife and son and then praise God for delivering them into his hands.

Update: I received the following comment on this post, which filled me with hope, and demonstrated more moral courage than perhaps every other anonymous comment in this blog’s 20-year history combined. To this commenter and their friends and family, I wish safety and eventually, liberation from tyranny.

I will keep my name private for clear reasons. Thank you for your concern for Iranians’ safety and for wishing the mullah regime’s swift collapse. I have fled Tehran and I’m physically safe but mentally, I’m devastated by the war and the internet blackout (the pretext is that Israeli drones are using our internet). Speaking of what the mullahs have done, especially outrageous was the attack on the Weizmann Institute. I hope your wife and son remain safe from the missiles of the regime whose thugs have chased me and my friends in the streets and imprisoned my friends for simple dissent. All’s well that ends well, and I hope this all ends well.

Quantum breakthrough: ‘Magic states’ now easier, faster, and way less noisy

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 03:38:16 +0000

Quantum computing just got a significant boost thanks to researchers at the University of Osaka, who developed a much more efficient way to create "magic states"—a key component for fault-tolerant quantum computers. By pioneering a low-level, or "level-zero," distillation method, they dramatically reduced the number of qubits and computational resources needed, overcoming one of the biggest obstacles: quantum noise. This innovation could accelerate the arrival of powerful quantum machines capable of revolutionizing industries from finance to biotech.

Fleet Space Advances Quantum-Enhanced Mineral Exploration with New Partnerships

dougfinke — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 21:09:55 +0000

In a strategic move aimed at pushing the frontier of mineral exploration, Australian space and exploration tech firm Fleet Space Technologies has announced collaborations with three quantum sensing innovators: mDetect, Nomad Atomics, and DeteQt. These partnerships are designed to accelerate the development and integration of advanced quantum sensors into Fleet’s ExoSphere platform, a vertically integrated [...]

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IQC and Waterloo mourn the loss of Raymond Laflamme

Takudzwa Chipo Valerie Mudzongo — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Raymond Laflamme, a trailblazer in quantum information processing and pioneer of IQC, died on June 19 after a lengthy battle with cancer.

Tags: IQC community updates and highlights

G7 leaders and Canada’s Prime Minister’s Office affirm strategic commitment to quantum technologies

Naomi Grosman — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0000

IQC welcomes the G7 leaders' Kananaskis Common Vision for the Future of Quantum Technologies

Tags: Research, Awards, grants and funding

How to deliver on the powerful promise of quantum computers

Naomi Grosman — Fri, 23 May 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Fri, 23 May 2025 12:00:00 +0000

New tool created by IQC's Michele Mosca and Vlad Gheorghiu estimates real-world costs of quantum computing so businesses can become quantum ready

Tags: Quantum computing

Cracking the Top Fifty!

Scott — Thu, 08 May 2025 21:26:34 +0000

I’ve now been blogging for nearly twenty years—through five presidential administrations, my own moves from Waterloo to MIT to UT Austin, my work on algebrization and BosonSampling and BQP vs. PH and quantum money and shadow tomography, the publication of Quantum Computing Since Democritus, my courtship and marriage and the birth of my two kids, a global pandemic, the rise of super-powerful AI and the terrifying downfall of the liberal world order.

Yet all that time, through more than a thousand blog posts on quantum computing, complexity theory, philosophy, the state of the world, and everything else, I chased a form of recognition for my blogging that remained elusive.

Until now.

This week I received the following email:

I emailed regarding your blog Shtetl-Optimized Blog which was selected by FeedSpot as one of the Top 50 Quantum Computing Blogs on the web.

https://bloggers.feedspot.com/quantum_computing_blogs

We recommend adding your website link and other social media handles to get more visibility in our list, get better ranking and get discovered by brands for collaboration.

We’ve also created a badge for you to highlight this recognition. You can proudly display it on your website or share it with your followers on social media.

We’d be thankful if you can help us spread the word by briefly mentioning Top 50 Quantum Computing Blogs in any of your upcoming posts.

Please let me know if you can do the needful.

You read that correctly: Shtetl-Optimized is now officially one of the top 50 quantum computing blogs on the web. You can click the link to find the other 49.

Maybe it’s not unrelated to this new notoriety that, over the past few months, I’ve gotten a massively higher-than-usual volume of emailed solutions to the P vs. NP problem, as well as the other Clay Millennium Problems (sometimes all seven problems at once), as well as quantum gravity and life, the universe, and everything. I now get at least six or seven confident such emails per day.

While I don’t spend much time on this flood of scientific breakthroughs (how could I?), I’d like to note one detail that’s new. Many of the emails now include transcripts where ChatGPT fills in the details of the emailer’s theories for them—unironically, as though that ought to clinch the case. Who said generative AI wasn’t poised to change the world? Indeed, I’ll probably need to start relying on LLMs myself to keep up with the flood of fan mail, hate mail, crank mail, and advice-seeking mail.

Anyway, thanks for reading everyone! I look forward to another twenty years of Shtetl-Optimized, if my own health and the health of the world cooperate.

'Universe's awkward handshake' -- simplifying information processing using photons a quantum breakthrough

Thu, 08 May 2025 15:31:24 +0000

Researchers have developed a technique that makes high-dimensional quantum information encoded in light more practical and reliable. The advancement could pave the way for more secure data transmission and next-generation quantum technologies.

Opposing SB37

Scott — Tue, 06 May 2025 18:21:56 +0000

Yesterday, the Texas State Legislature heard public comments about SB37, a bill that would give a state board direct oversight over course content and faculty hiring at public universities, perhaps inspired by Trump’s national crackdown on higher education. (See here or here for coverage.) So, encouraged by a friend in the history department, I submitted the following public comment, whatever good it will do.

I’m a computer science professor at UT, although I’m writing in my personal capacity. For 20 years, on my blog and elsewhere, I’ve been outspoken in opposing woke radicalism on campus and (especially) obsessive hatred of Israel that often veers into antisemitism, even when that’s caused me to get attacked from my left. Nevertheless, I write to strongly oppose SB37 in its current form, because of my certainty that no world-class research university can survive ceding control over its curriculum and faculty hiring to the state. If this bill passes, for example, it will severely impact my ability to recruit the most talented computer scientists to UT Austin, if they have competing options that will safeguard their academic freedom as traditionally conceived. Even if our candidates are approved, the new layer of bureaucracy will make it difficult and slow for us to do anything. For those concerned about intellectual diversity in academia, a much better solution would include safeguarding tenure and other protections for faculty with heterodox views, and actually enforcing content-neutral time, place, and manner rules for protests and disruptions. UT has actually done a better job on these things than many other universities in the US, and could serve as a national model for how viewpoint diversity can work — but not under an intolerably stifling regime like the one proposed by this bill.

Experimental quantum communications network

Tue, 06 May 2025 17:13:36 +0000

Researchers recently connected their campuses with an experimental quantum communications network using two optical fibers.

A new method for characterizing quantum gate errors

Tue, 06 May 2025 00:49:15 +0000

Researchers have developed a new protocol for characterizing quantum gate errors, paving the way toward more reliable quantum simulations and fault-tolerant quantum computing.

New Bayesian method enables rapid detection of quantum dot charge states

Thu, 01 May 2025 16:24:49 +0000

A research team has developed a new technique to rapidly and accurately determine the charge state of electrons confined in semiconductor quantum dots -- fundamental components of quantum computing systems. The method is based on Bayesian inference, a statistical framework that estimates the most likely state of a system using observed data.

Battling quantum decoherence, one flat band at a time

Naomi Grosman — Thu, 01 May 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Thu, 01 May 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Researchers have reported a novel material platform where flat bands universally emerge in a wide range of Transition Metal Dichalcogenide (TMD) compounds with many potential applications like manipulating properties of 2D magnetic materials through ion intercalation, which could lead to improvements and applications in areas such as memory storage technology, reconfigurable neural networks, and high-frequency sensors.

Tags: Research, Quantum materials and devices

Quantum! AI! Everything but Trump!

Scott — Thu, 01 May 2025 03:16:57 +0000

Grant Sanderson, of 3blue1brown, has put up a phenomenal YouTube video explaining Grover’s algorithm, and dispelling the fundamental misconception about quantum computing, that QC works simply by “trying all the possibilities in parallel.” Let me not futz around: this video explains, in 36 minutes, what I’ve tried to explain over and over on this blog for 20 years … and it does it better. It’s a masterpiece. Yes, I consulted with Grant for this video (he wanted my intuitions for “why is the answer √N?”), and I even have a cameo at the end of it, but I wish I had made the video. Damn you, Grant!

The incomparably great, and absurdly prolific, blogger Zvi Mowshowitz and yours truly spend 1 hour and 40 minutes discussing AI existential risk, education, blogging, and more. I end up “interviewing” Zvi, who does the majority of the talking, which is fine by me, as he has many important things to say! (Among them: his searing critique of those K-12 educators who see it as their life’s mission to prevent kids from learning too much too fast—I’ve linked his best piece on this from the header of this blog.) Thanks so much to Rick Coyle for arranging this conversation.

Progress in quantum complexity theory! In 2000, John Watrous showed that the Group Non-Membership problem is in the complexity class QMA (Quantum Merlin-Arthur). In other words, if some element g is not contained in a given subgroup H of an exponentially large finite group G, which is specified via a black box, then there’s a short quantum proof that g∉H, with only ~log|G| qubits, which can be verified on a quantum computer in time polynomial in log|G|. This soon raised the question of whether Group Non-Membership could be used to separate QMA from QCMA by oracles, where QCMA (Quantum Classical Merlin Arthur), defined by Aharonov and Naveh in 2002, is the subclass of QMA where the proof needs to be classical, but the verification procedure can still be quantum. In other words, could Group Non-Membership be the first non-quantum example where quantum proofs actually help?

In 2006, alas, Greg Kuperberg and I showed that the answer was probably “no”: Group Non-Membership has “polynomial QCMA query complexity.” This means that there’s a QCMA protocol for the problem where Arthur makes only polylog|G| quantum queries to the group oracle—albeit, possibly an exponential in log|G| number of quantum computation steps besides that! To prove our result, Greg and I needed to make mild use of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, one of the crowning achievements of 20th-century mathematics (its proof is about 15,000 pages long). We conjectured (but couldn’t prove) that someone else, who knew more about the Classification than we did, could show that Group Non-Membership was simply in QCMA outright.

Now, after almost 20 years, François Le Gall, Harumichi Nishimura, and Dhara Thakkar have finally proven our conjecture—showing that Group Order, and therefore also Group Non-Membership, are indeed in QCMA. They did indeed need to use the Classification, doing one thing for almost all finite groups covered by the Classification, but a different thing for groups of “Ree type” (whatever those are).

Interestingly, the Group Membership problem had also been a candidate for separating BQP/qpoly, or quantum polynomial time with polynomial-size quantum advice—my personal favorite complexity class—from BQP/poly, or the same thing with polynomial-size classical advice. And it might conceivably still be! The authors explain to me that their protocol doesn’t put Group Membership (with group G and subgroup H depending only on the input length n) into BQP/poly, the reason being that their short classical witnesses for g∉H depend on both g and H, in contrast to Watrous’s quantum witnesses which depended only on H. So there’s still plenty that’s open here! Actually, for that matter, I don’t know of good evidence that the entire Group Membership problem isn’t in BQP—i.e., that quantum computers can’t just solve the whole thing outright, with no Merlins or witnesses in sight!

Anyway, huge congratulations to Le Gall, Nishimura, and Thakkar for peeling back our ignorance of these matters a bit further! Reeeeeeeee!
Potential big progress in quantum algorithms! Vittorio Giovannetti, Seth Lloyd, and Lorenzo Maccone (GLM) have given what they present as a quantum algorithm to estimate the determinant of an n×n matrix A, exponentially faster in some contexts than we know how to do it classically. The algorithm is closely related to the 2008 HHL (Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd) quantum algorithm for solving systems of linear equations. Which means that anyone who knows the history of this class of quantum algorithms knows to ask immediately: what’s the fine print? A couple weeks ago, when I visited Harvard and MIT, I had a chance to catch up with Seth Lloyd, so I asked him, and he kindly told me. Firstly, we assume the matrix A is Hermitian and positive semidefinite. Next, we assume A is sparse, and not only that, but there’s a QRAM data structure that points to its nonzero entries, so you don’t need to do Grover search or the like to find them, and can query them in coherent superposition. Finally, we assume that all the eigenvalues of A are at least some constant λ>0. The algorithm then estimates det(A), to multiplicative error ε, in time that scales linearly with log(n), and polynomially with 1/λ and 1/ε.

Now for the challenge I leave for ambitious readers: is there a classical randomized algorithm to estimate the determinant under the same assumptions and with comparable running time? In other words, can the GLM algorithm be “Ewinized”? Seth didn’t know, and I think it’s a wonderful crisp open question! On the one hand, if Ewinization is possible, it wouldn’t be the first time that publicity on this blog had led to the brutal murder of a tantalizing quantum speedup. On the other hand … well, maybe not! I also consider it possible that the problem solved by GLM—for exponentially-large, implicitly-specified matrices A—is BQP-complete, as for example was the general problem solved by HHL. This would mean, for example, that one could embed Shor’s factoring algorithm into GLM, and that there’s no hope of dequantizing it unless P=BQP. (Even then, though, just like with the HHL algorithm, we’d still face the question of whether the GLM algorithm was “independently useful,” or whether it merely reproduced quantum speedups that were already known.)

Anyway, quantum algorithms research lives! So does dequantization research! If basic science in the US is able to continue at all—the thing I promised not to talk about in this post—we’ll have plenty to keep us busy over the next few years.

Engineers advance toward a fault-tolerant quantum computer

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 18:26:17 +0000

Researchers demonstrated extremely strong nonlinear light-matter coupling in a quantum circuit. Stronger coupling enables faster quantum readout and operations, ultimately improving the accuracy of quantum operations.

MIT engineers advance toward a fault-tolerant quantum computer

Adam Zewe | MIT News — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In the future, quantum computers could rapidly simulate new materials or help scientists develop faster machine-learning models, opening the door to many new possibilities.

But these applications will only be possible if quantum computers can perform operations extremely quickly, so scientists can make measurements and perform corrections before compounding error rates reduce their accuracy and reliability.

The efficiency of this measurement process, known as readout, relies on the strength of the coupling between photons, which are particles of light that carry quantum information, and artificial atoms, units of matter that are often used to store information in a quantum computer.

Now, MIT researchers have demonstrated what they believe is the strongest nonlinear light-matter coupling ever achieved in a quantum system. Their experiment is a step toward realizing quantum operations and readout that could be performed in a few nanoseconds.

The researchers used a novel superconducting circuit architecture to show nonlinear light-matter coupling that is about an order of magnitude stronger than prior demonstrations, which could enable a quantum processor to run about 10 times faster.

There is still much work to be done before the architecture could be used in a real quantum computer, but demonstrating the fundamental physics behind the process is a major step in the right direction, says Yufeng “Bright” Ye SM ’20, PhD ’24, lead author of a paper on this research.

“This would really eliminate one of the bottlenecks in quantum computing. Usually, you have to measure the results of your computations in between rounds of error correction. This could accelerate how quickly we can reach the fault-tolerant quantum computing stage and be able to get real-world applications and value out of our quantum computers,” says Ye.

He is joined on the paper by senior author Kevin O’Brien, an associate professor and principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT who leads the Quantum Coherent Electronics Group in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), as well as others at MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Harvard University. The research appears today in Nature Communications.

A new coupler

This physical demonstration builds on years of theoretical research in the O’Brien group.

After Ye joined the lab as a PhD student in 2019, he began developing a specialized photon detector to enhance quantum information processing.

Through that work, he invented a new type of quantum coupler, which is a device that facilitates interactions between qubits. Qubits are the building blocks of a quantum computer. This so-called quarton coupler had so many potential applications in quantum operations and readout that it quickly became a focus of the lab.

This quarton coupler is a special type of superconducting circuit that has the potential to generate extremely strong nonlinear coupling, which is essential for running most quantum algorithms. As the researchers feed more current into the coupler, it creates an even stronger nonlinear interaction. In this sense, nonlinearity means a system behaves in a way that is greater than the sum of its parts, exhibiting more complex properties.

“Most of the useful interactions in quantum computing come from nonlinear coupling of light and matter. If you can get a more versatile range of different types of coupling, and increase the coupling strength, then you can essentially increase the processing speed of the quantum computer,” Ye explains.

For quantum readout, researchers shine microwave light onto a qubit and then, depending on whether that qubit is in state 0 or 1, there is a frequency shift on its associated readout resonator. They measure this shift to determine the qubit’s state.

Nonlinear light-matter coupling between the qubit and resonator enables this measurement process.

The MIT researchers designed an architecture with a quarton coupler connected to two superconducting qubits on a chip. They turn one qubit into a resonator and use the other qubit as an artificial atom which stores quantum information. This information is transferred in the form of microwave light particles called photons.

“The interaction between these superconducting artificial atoms and the microwave light that routes the signal is basically how an entire superconducting quantum computer is built,” Ye explains.

Enabling faster readout

The quarton coupler creates nonlinear light-matter coupling between the qubit and resonator that’s about an order of magnitude stronger than researchers had achieved before. This could enable a quantum system with lightning-fast readout.

“This work is not the end of the story. This is the fundamental physics demonstration, but there is work going on in the group now to realize really fast readout,” O’Brien says.

That would involve adding additional electronic components, such as filters, to produce a readout circuit that could be incorporated into a larger quantum system.

The researchers also demonstrated extremely strong matter-matter coupling, another type of qubit interaction that is important for quantum operations. This is another area they plan to explore with future work.

Fast operations and readout are especially important for quantum computers because qubits have finite lifespans, a concept known as coherence time.

Stronger nonlinear coupling enables a quantum processor to run faster and with lower error, so the qubits can perform more operations in the same amount of time. This means the qubits can run more rounds of error correction during their lifespans.

“The more runs of error correction you can get in, the lower the error will be in the results,” Ye says.

In the long run, this work could help scientists build a fault-tolerant quantum computer, which is essential for practical, large-scale quantum computation.

This research was supported, in part, by the Army Research Office, the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, and the MIT Center for Quantum Engineering.

Physicists uncover hidden order in the quantum world through deconfined quantum critical points

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 15:38:06 +0000

A recent study has unraveled some of the secrets concealed within the entangled web of quantum systems.

Fight Fiercely

Scott — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 11:48:25 +0000

Last week I visited Harvard and MIT, and as advertised in my last post, gave the Yip Lecture at Harvard on the subject “How Much Math Is Knowable?” The visit was hosted by Harvard’s wonderful Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA), directed by my former UT Austin colleague Dan Freed. Thanks so much to everyone at CMSA for the visit.

And good news! You can now watch my lecture on YouTube here:

I’m told it was one of my better performances. As always, I strongly recommend watching at 2x speed.

I opened the lecture by saying that, while obviously it would always be an honor to give the Yip Lecture at Harvard, it’s especially an honor right now, as the rest of American academia looks to Harvard to defend the value of our entire enterprise. I urged Harvard to “fight fiercely,” in the words of the Tom Lehrer song.

I wasn’t just fishing for applause; I meant it. It’s crucial for people to understand that, in its total war against universities, MAGA has now lost, not merely the anti-Israel leftists, but also most conservatives, classical liberals, Zionists, etc. with any intellectual scruples whatsoever. To my mind, this opens up the possibility for a broad, nonpartisan response, highlighting everything universities (yes, even Harvard Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the University of Buffalo, IQC and other institutions have created the first neutron “Airy beam,” which has unusual capabilities that ordinary neutron beams do not.

Tags: Research, Quantum computing

An elegant method for the detection of single spins using photovoltage

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 18:38:15 +0000

Diamonds with certain optically active defects can be used as highly sensitive sensors or qubits for quantum computers, where the quantum information is stored in the electron spin state of these colour centeres. However, the spin states have to be read out optically, which is often experimentally complex. Now, a team has developed an elegant method using a photo voltage to detect the individual and local spin states of these defects. This could lead to a much more compact design of quantum sensors.

I speak at Harvard as it faces its biggest crisis since 1636

Scott — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 17:22:35 +0000

Every week, I tell myself I won’t do yet another post about the asteroid striking American academia, and then every week events force my hand otherwise.

No one on earth—certainly no one who reads this blog—could call me blasé about the issue of antisemitism at US universities. I’ve blasted the takeover of entire departments and unrelated student clubs and campus common areas by the dogmatic belief that the State of Israel (and only Israel, among all nations on earth) should be eradicated, by the use of that belief as a litmus test for entry. Since October 7, I’ve dealt with comments and emails pretty much every day calling me a genocidal Judeofascist Zionist.

So I hope it means something when I say: today I salute Harvard for standing up to the Trump administration. And I’ll say so in person, when I visit Harvard’s math department later this week to give the Fifth Annual Yip Lecture, on “How Much Math Is Knowable?” The more depressing the news, I find, the more my thoughts turn to the same questions that bothered Euclid and Archimedes and Leibniz and Russell and Turing. Actually, what the hell, why don’t I share the abstract for this talk?

Theoretical computer science has over the years sought more and more refined answers to the question of which mathematical truths are knowable by finite beings like ourselves, bounded in time and space and subject to physical laws. I’ll tell a story that starts with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Turing’s discovery of uncomputability. I’ll then introduce the spectacular Busy Beaver function, which grows faster than any computable function. Work by me and Yedidia, along with recent improvements by O’Rear and Riebel, has shown that the value of BB(745) is independent of the axioms of set theory; on the other end, an international collaboration proved last year that BB(5) = 47,176,870. I’ll speculate on whether BB(6) will ever be known, by us or our AI successors. I’ll next discuss the P≠NP conjecture and what it does and doesn’t mean for the limits of machine intelligence. As my own specialty is quantum computing, I’ll summarize what we know about how scalable quantum computers, assuming we get them, will expand the boundary of what’s mathematically knowable. I’ll end by talking about hypothetical models even beyond quantum computers, which might expand the boundary of knowability still further, if one is able (for example) to jump into a black hole, create a closed timelike curve, or project oneself onto the holographic boundary of the universe.

Now back to the depressing news. What makes me take Harvard’s side is the experience of Columbia. Columbia had already been moving in the right direction on fighting antisemitism, and on enforcing its rules against disruption, before the government even got involved. Then, once the government did take away funding and present its ultimatum—completely outside the process specified in Title VI law—Columbia’s administration quickly agreed to everything asked, to howls of outrage from the left-leaning faculty. Yet despite its total capitulation, the government has continued to hold Columbia’s medical research and other science funding hostage, while inventing a never-ending list of additional demands, whose apparent endpoint is that Columbia submit to state ideological control like a university in Russia or Iran.

By taking this scorched-earth route, the government has effectively telegraphed to all the other universities, as clearly as possible: “actually, we don’t care what you do or don’t do on antisemitism. We just want to destroy you, and antisemitism was our best available pretext, the place where you’d most obviously fallen short of your ideals. But we’re not really trying to cure a sick patient, or force the patient to adopt better health habits: we’re trying to shoot, disembowel, and dismember the patient. That being the case, you might as well fight us and go down with dignity!”

No wonder that my distinguished Harvard friends (and past Shtetl-Optimized guest bloggers) Steven Pinker and Boaz Barak—not exactly known as anti-Zionist woke radicals—have come out in favor of Harvard fighting this in court. So has Harvard’s past president Larry Summers, who’s welcome to guest-blog here as well. They all understand that events have given us no choice but to fight Trump as if there were no antisemitism, even while we continue to fight antisemitism as if there were no Trump.

Update (April 16): Commenter Greg argues that, in the title of this post, I probably ought to revise “Harvard’s biggest crisis since 1636” to “its biggest crisis since 1640.” Why 1640? Because that’s when the new college was shut down, over allegations that its head teacher was beating the students and that the head teacher’s wife (who was also the cook) was serving the students food adulterated with dung. By 1642, Harvard was back on track and had graduated its first class.

My most rage-inducing beliefs

Scott — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 15:42:43 +0000

A friend and I were discussing whether there’s anything I could possibly say, on this blog, in 2025, that wouldn’t provoke an outraged reaction from my commenters. So I started jotting down ideas. Let’s see how I did.

Pancakes are a delicious breakfast, especially with blueberries and maple syrup.
Since it’s now Passover, and no pancakes for me this week, let me add: I think matzoh has been somewhat unfairly maligned. Of course it tastes like cardboard if you eat it plain, but it’s pretty tasty with butter, fruit preserves, tuna salad, egg salad, or chopped liver.
Central Texas is actually really nice in the springtime, with lush foliage and good weather for being outside.
Kittens are cute. So are puppies, although I’d go for kittens given the choice.
Hamilton is a great musical—so much so that it’s become hard to think about the American Founding except as Lin-Manuel Miranda reimagined it, with rap battles in Washington’s cabinet and so forth. I’m glad I got to take my kids to see it last week, when it was in Austin (I hadn’t seen it since it its pre-Broadway previews a decade ago). Two-hundred fifty years on, I hope America remembers its founding promise, and that Hamilton doesn’t turn out to be America’s eulogy.
The Simpsons and Futurama are hilarious.
Young Sheldon and The Big Bang Theory are unjustly maligned. They were about as good as any sitcoms can possibly be.
For the most part, people should be free to live lives of their choosing, as long as they’re not harming others.
The rapid progress of AI might be the most important thing that’s happened in my lifetime. There’s a huge range of plausible outcomes, from “merely another technological transformation like computing or the Internet” to “biggest thing since the appearance of multicellular life,” but in any case, we ought to proceed with caution and with the wider interests of humanity foremost in our minds.
Research into curing cancer is great and should continue to be supported.
The discoveries of NP-completeness, public-key encryption, zero-knowledge and probabilistically checkable proofs, and quantum computational speedups were milestones in the history of theoretical computer science, worthy of celebration.
Katalin Karikó, who pioneered mRNA vaccines, is a heroine of humanity. We should figure out how to create more Katalin Karikós.
Scientists spend too much of their time writing grant proposals, and not enough doing actual science. We should experiment with new institutions to fix this.
I wish California could build high-speed rail from LA to San Francisco. If California’s Democrats could show they could do this, it would be an electoral boon to Democrats nationally.
I wish the US could build clean energy, including wind, solar, and nuclear. Actually, more generally, we should do everything recommended in Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s phenomenal new book Abundance, which I just finished.
The great questions of philosophy—why does the universe exist? how does consciousness relate to the physical world? what grounds morality?—are worthy of respect, as primary drivers of human curiosity for millennia. Scientists and engineers should never sneer at these questions. All the same, I personally couldn’t spend my life on such questions: I also need small problems, ones where I can make definite progress.
Quantum physics, which turns 100 this year, is arguably the most metaphysical of all empirical discoveries. It’s worthy of returning to again and again in life, asking: but how could the world be that way? Is there a different angle that we missed?
If I knew for sure that I could achieve Enlightenment, but only by meditating on a mountaintop for a decade, a further question would arise: is it worth it? Or would I rather spend that decade engaged with the world, with scientific problems and with other people?
I, too, vote for political parties, and have sectarian allegiances. But I’m most moved by human creative effort, in science or literature or anything else, that transcends time and place and circumstance and speaks to the eternal.
As I was writing this post, a bird died by flying straight into the window of my home office. As little sense as it might make from a utilitarian standpoint, I am sad for that bird.

Canada’s investments in quantum research drive real-world results

Naomi Grosman — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0000

IQC’s impact shows power of collaboration in advancing research and commercialization of quantum technology.

Tags: IQC community updates and highlights

Institute for Quantum Computing welcomes the Times Higher Education Digital Health 2025 summit

Naomi Grosman — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Snapshots of IQC

Tags: IQC community updates and highlights

Researchers demonstrate the UK's first long-distance ultra-secure communication over a quantum network

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 23:25:48 +0000

Researchers have successfully demonstrated the UK's first long-distance ultra-secure transfer of data over a quantum communications network, including the UK's first long-distance quantum-secured video call.

Scientists merge two 'impossible' materials into new artificial structure

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:08:57 +0000

An international team has merged two lab-synthesized materials into a synthetic quantum structure once thought impossible to exist and produced an exotic structure expected to provide insights that could lead to new materials at the core of quantum computing.

Transducer could enable superconducting quantum networks

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 16:28:46 +0000

Applied physicists have created a photon router that could plug into quantum networks to create robust optical interfaces for noise-sensitive microwave quantum computers.

Diraq and Fermilab launch five-year quantum sensing collaboration to support dark matter search

tracym — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 19:58:39 +0000

Fermilab and Diraq announced a multi-institution collaboration to develop a novel quantum sensor platform for high-energy physics named Quandarum.

The post Diraq and Fermilab launch five-year quantum sensing collaboration to support dark matter search appeared first on News.

Researchers find a way to shield quantum information from 'noise'

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 18:17:47 +0000

Researchers have discovered a way to protect quantum information from environmental disruptions, offering hope for more reliable future technologies.

Entangled in self-discovery: Quantum computers analyze their own entanglement

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 16:35:36 +0000

Quantum computers are able to solve complex calculations that would take traditional computers thousands of years in just a few minutes. What if that analytical power is turned inwards towards the computer itself?

New type of quantum computer studies the dance of elementary particles

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 15:54:39 +0000

The study of elementary particles and forces is of central importance to our understanding of the universe. Now a team of physicists shows how an unconventional type of quantum computer opens a new door to the world of elementary particles.

Listen to quantum atoms talk together thanks to acoustics

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 15:51:25 +0000

To get around the constraints of quantum physics, researchers have built a new acoustic system to study the way the minuscule atoms of condensed matter talk together. They hope to one day build an acoustic version of a quantum computer.

Device enables direct communication among multiple quantum processors

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 16:13:24 +0000

Researchers developed a scalable interconnect that facilitates all-to-all communication among many quantum processor modules by enabling each to send and receive quantum information on demand in a user-specified direction. They used the interconnect to demonstrate remote entanglement, a type of correlation that is key to creating a powerful, distributed network of quantum processors.

Researchers establish new basis for quantum sensing and communication

MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 20:20:00 +0000

Sensing and communication systems based on quantum-mechanical phenomena can greatly outperform today’s systems, in terms of accuracy and reliability, and are considered a pivotal part of developing next-generation networks. Developing quantum information and decision systems that come close to meeting the theoretical quantum advantages has been a longstanding challenge. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and the University of Ferrara (UniFe) in Italy has developed a framework that could open up new ways of pushing such quantum systems all the way to their fundamental limits.

The key to the team’s new approach is the use of what are known as non-Gaussian quantum states. Most works on quantum sensing and communication systems are based on Gaussian states — namely, states of the electromagnetic field that can be described by Gaussian models. However, many quantum systems based on Gaussian states inevitably suffer from limitations that prevent them from achieving the full quantum advantage.

The reason quantum systems employing Gaussian states have dominated the research in this field is because they are much easier to understand and implement. Now, the MIT and UniFe team has come up with a solution that overcomes limitations of Gaussian states and could unleash a significant leap in the development of quantum information and decision systems.

The findings were recently reported in the Journal on Selected Areas in Information Theory, in a paper by MIT Professor Moe Z. Win, UniFe graduate student Andrea Giani (who has been a visiting student at MIT for the past year), and UniFe Professor Andrea Conti.

“While Gaussian states are well known and relatively easy to prepare, they don’t possess some properties that are necessary for achieving the full quantum advantage,” Giani explains. But by leveraging the properties of non-Gaussian states instead, he says, “we can overcome these sorts of limitations.”

He adds that “quantum sensing and communication systems are expected to provide significant advantages with respect to their classical counterparts.” For example, quantum sensing systems can be more sensitive to the variations of an electromagnetic field than existing classical ones. Such quantum systems can be far more powerful than any existing methods for inferring physical quantities in the presence of noise. Such capabilities could be crucial for many areas, ranging from fingerprinting the magnetic field of the Earth to enhancing astrophysical research.

The mathematical basis laid out in this new work “could pave the way for the development of quantum information and decision systems that capitalize on the unique properties of non-Gaussian states,” says Win, who is the Robert R. Taylor Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and founding director of the Quantum neXus Laboratory. “Now that we have established the theoretical foundation for quantum sensing and communication using these states, the next step is for us to determine how to optimally design these states for a variety of applications,” he says.

The new work proposes a particular category of non-Gaussian states known as photon-varied Gaussian states (PVGSs), which can be produced with current technologies. The team’s findings show that these PVGSs can indeed enhance the accuracy of quantum sensing, as well as improve the reliability of quantum communications. “We provide a unified characterization of PVGSs,” Conti says, “which facilitates the design of optimal quantum states for sensing and communications.” The unified characterization of quantum states not only simplifies theoretical derivations but also enables practical implementations. “We believe that quantum sensing and communication systems employing PVGSs will become a reality in the near future,” he says.

“All systems, classical or quantum, have a fundamental performance limit,” Win says, “and the use of quantum-mechanical phenomena will unleash new quantum limits” that far surpass classical limits. “Our research philosophy,” he says, “is to establish such limits, from which we develop efficient design methodologies for quantum systems and networks that are reasonable from a perspective of implementation.”

At MIT, Win is a principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and is also affiliated with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society; the MIT School of Engineering; MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; and the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. He formerly worked at AT&T Research Laboratories and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Win regularly collaborates with Conti at the University of Ferrara, and “we have developed a successful long-term relationship over multiple decades,” he says. The goal of their current research effort is to unleash the potential of quantum information and decision systems, expediting their maturation toward practical utility.

The research was supported by the Robert R. Taylor Professorship at MIT, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca, and the European Union NextGenerationEU.

First operating system for quantum networks

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 16:38:58 +0000

Researchers have announced the creation of the first operating system designed for quantum networks: QNodeOS. The research marks a major step forward in transforming quantum networking from a theoretical concept to a practical technology that could revolutionize the future of the internet.

Untangling quantum entanglement with new calculation formulas

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 05:07:56 +0000

Physicists developed simplified formulas to quantify quantum entanglement in strongly correlated electron systems. Their approach was applied to nanoscale materials, revealing unexpected quantum behaviors and identifying key quantities for the Kondo effect. These findings advance understanding of quantum technologies.