Lifeboat Foundation

Seeqc, a startup that is part of a relatively new class of quantum computing companies that is looking at how to best use classical computing to manage quantum processors, today announced that it has raised $5 million from M Ventures, the strategic corporate venture capital arm of Merck, the German pharmaceutical giant. Merck will be a strategic partner for Seeqc and will help it to develop its R&D efforts to develop useful application-specific quantum computers.

With this, New York state-based Seeqc has now raised a total of $11 million, including a recent $6.8 million seed round that included BlueYard Capital, Cambium, NewLab and the Partnership Fund for New York City.

Since developing new pharmaceuticals is an obvious use case for quantum computing, it makes sense that large pharmaceutical companies are trying to get ahead of their competitors by making strategic investments in companies like Seeqc.

CERN has established a task force to identify and support contributions from the Organization’s 18 000-strong global community to combatting the COVID-19 pandemic. Set up by the Director-General at the end of March, the CERN against COVID-19 task force has already received hundreds of messages suggesting ideas ranging from producing sanitizer gel to designing and building sophisticated medical equipment. The design of a novel ventilator, expected to be tested by healthcare experts in the coming weeks, is an example of deployment of CERN’s technology to the service of society in these troubled times. Details of the initiatives and projects supported will be published on the dedicated website cern.ch/against-covid-19, which will be regularly updated.

“CERN is a world leading laboratory in particle physics and in the related technologies. As such, it’s a hub of resources, including the World-wide LHC Computing Grid, WLCG, mechanical workshops, sophisticated design and prototyping facilities, advanced technologies and expertise ranging from science and engineering to industrialisation,” said Director-General Fabiola Gianotti. “We want to deploy our resources and competences to contribute to the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.”

CERN’s overall approach is to ensure effective and well-coordinated action, drawing on CERN’s many competencies and advanced technologies and working closely with experts in healthcare, drug development, epidemiology and emergency response so as to maximise the impact of the Organization’s contributions. To this end, the Organization has established links with local hospitals and emergency services, and in the context of an agreement established in 2011, entered into dialogue with experts at the World Health Organization. Discussions are also underway with sister European scientific organisations, the European Molecular Biology Organization and the European Bioinformatics Institute.

For years, scientists have looked for ways to cool molecules down to ultracold temperatures, at which point the molecules should slow to a crawl, allowing scientists to precisely control their quantum behavior. This could enable researchers to use molecules as complex bits for quantum computing, tuning individual molecules like tiny knobs to carry out multiple streams of calculations at a time.

While scientists have super-cooled atoms, doing the same for molecules, which are more complex in their behavior and structure, has proven to be a much bigger challenge.

Now MIT physicists have found a way to cool molecules of sodium lithium down to 200 billionths of a Kelvin, just a hair above absolute zero. They did so by applying a technique called collisional cooling, in which they immersed molecules of cold sodium lithium in a cloud of even colder sodium atoms. The ultracold atoms acted as a refrigerant to cool the molecules even further.

“Collisional cooling has been the workhorse for cooling atoms,” adds Nobel Prize laureate Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. Arthur professor of physics at MIT. “I wasn’t convinced that our scheme would work, but since we didn’t know for sure, we had to try it. We know now that it works for cooling sodium lithium molecules. Whether it will work for other classes of molecules remains to be seen.” MIT School of Science, Harvard — MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, RLE at MIT — Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, #research #supercooledatoms #nanokelvin #WolfgangKetterle

Technique may enable molecule-based quantum computing.

Abstract: Quantum optics is the study of the intrinsically quantum properties of light. During the second part of the 20th century experimental and theoretical progress developed together; nowadays quantum optics provides a testbed of many fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics such as coherence and quantum entanglement. Quantum optics helped trigger, both directly and indirectly, the birth of quantum technologies, whose aim is to harness non-classical quantum effects in applications from quantum key distribution to quantum computing. Quantum light remains at the heart of many of the most promising and potentially transformative quantum technologies. In this review, we celebrate the work of Sir Peter Knight and present an overview of the development of quantum optics and its impact on quantum technologies research. We describe the core theoretical tools developed to express and study the quantum properties of light, the key experimental approaches used to control, manipulate and measure such properties and their application in quantum simulation, and quantum computing.

A landmark proof in computer science has also solved an important problem called the Connes embedding conjecture. Mathematicians are working to understand it.

A new quantum computer under development is slated to have 1 million qubits – significantly more powerful than Google’s most recent milestone. PsiQuantum Corp., a Silicon Valley company, is developing a photon-based commercial quantum computer that runs on light. The company has raised $215 million from investors with participation from BlackRock Advisors, Founders Fund, Atomico and Redpoint Ventures. The company’s ote.

While a working prototype is estimated to be years away, the advanced technology is aiming to blow away the competition with a far superior machine.

Continue reading “Investors Pour $215 Million Into Quantum Computer Promising 1 Million Qubits – Enough Processing Power to Reshape Nearly Every Industry” »

#quantum #photonics

COPENHAGEN, April 3, 2020 — Using lasers, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen have developed a way to entangle electromagnetic fields from microwave radiation and optical beams. Creating entanglement between microwave and optical fields could help scientists solve the challenge of sharing entanglement between two distant quantum computers operating in the microwave regime.

PsiQuantum’s photon-based model is still years away, but the company says it’ll be more powerful than Google’s or IBM’s.