Lifeboat Foundation

The 12-qubit device will go out to a few academic research labs.

Intel does a lot of things, but it’s mostly noted for making and shipping a lot of processors, many of which have been named after bodies of water. So, saying that the company is set to start sending out a processor called Tunnel Falls would seem unsurprising if it weren’t for some key details. Among them: The processor’s functional units are qubits, and you shouldn’t expect to be able to pick one up on New Egg. Ever.

Tunnel Falls appears to be named after a waterfall near Intel’s Oregon facility, where the company’s quantum research team does much of its work. It’s a 12-qubit chip, which places it well behind the qubit count of many of Intel’s competitors—all of which are making processors available via cloud services. But Jim Clarke, who heads Intel’s quantum efforts, said these differences were due to the company’s distinct approach to developing quantum computers.

Typical superconducting quantum circuits, such as qubits—basic processing units of a quantum computer, must be operated at very low temperatures, of a few 10s of millikelvin, or hundredths of a degree from absolute zero temperature. These temperatures are today easily accessible in modern refrigerators. However, the intrinsic temperature of devices turns out to be much higher because the materials required to make good qubit circuits are by their nature very poor thermal conductors. This thermalization problem becomes more and more acute as the scale and complexity of circuits grow.

Much like water (or liquid nitrogen) cooling is sometimes used to effectively cool down high-performance digital computers, a quantum computer could benefit from similar liquid cooling. But at the very low temperatures that quantum circuits operate, most liquids will have turned into ice. Only two isotopes of Helium, Helium-3 and Helium-4, remain in the liquid form at millikelvin temperatures.

In recent work published in Nature Communications, researchers from the National Physical Laboratory, Royal Holloway University of London, Chalmers University of Technology and Google developed new technology to cool down a quantum circuit to less than a thousand of a degree above absolute zero, almost 100 times lower temperature than achieved before. This was made possible by immersing the circuit in liquid ³ He, chosen for its superior thermal properties.

Intel announced the next step on its road to quantum with the release of its latest quantum chip, a 12-qubit, silicon-based chip the company is calling “Tunnel Falls”. No, no, it’s okay, you can keep those greenbacks in your wallet: Intel isn’t in the commercialization phase yet. Instead, Tunnel Falls is meant to be a research test chip: it’s still a stepping stone towards the actual Quantum Processing Units of the future. Hopefully, those will be more like Intel’s own Tunnel Falls than Iran’s Amazon-based “quantum computing” technology.

“Tunnel Falls is Intel’s most advanced silicon spin qubit chip to date and draws upon the company’s decades of transistor design and manufacturing expertise. The release of the new chip is the next step in Intel’s long-term strategy to build a full-stack commercial quantum computing system. While there are still fundamental questions and challenges that must be solved along the path to a fault-tolerant quantum computer, the academic community can now explore this technology and accelerate research development.” says Jim Clarke, Intel’s director of Quantum Hardware.

While it may be underwhelming to know that Tunnel Falls is just a research test chip, it’s also an often overlooked necessity for any new technology. Before any work can be done within the quantum computers of the future, the algorithms, the learning and the how-to have to be started today. One issue with that is the difficulty in producing quantum computing hardware; there’s a reason such a small number of big companies — from Intel to Microsoft, IBM, IonQ, and Google — are actively developing quantum computing hardware.

Much like artificial intelligence, quantum computing has the potential to transform many industries. But a cybersecurity threat looms large.

Controlling chemical reactions to generate new products is one of the biggest challenges in chemistry. Developments in this area impact industry, for example, by reducing the waste generated in the manufacture of construction materials or by improving the production of catalysts to accelerate chemical reactions.

For this reason, in the field of polariton chemistry—which uses tools of chemistry and quantum optics—in the last 10 years different laboratories around the world have developed experiments in optical cavities to manipulate the chemical reactivity of molecules at room temperature, using electromagnetic fields. Some have succeeded in modifying chemical reactions products in organic compounds, but to date, and without relevant advances in the last two years, no research team has been able to come up with a general physical mechanism to describe the phenomenon and to reproduce it to obtain the same measurements in a consistent manner.

Now a team of researchers from Universidad de Santiago (Chile), part of the Millennium Institute for Research in Optics (MIRO), led by principal investigator Felipe Herrera, and the laboratory of the chemistry division of the US Naval Research Laboratory, (United States), led by researcher Blake Simpkins, for the first time report the manipulation of the formation rate of urethane molecules in a solution contained inside an infrared cavity.

During photosynthesis, a symphony of chemicals transforms light into the energy required for plant, algal, and some bacterial life. Scientists now know that this remarkable reaction requires the smallest possible amount of light – just one single photon – to begin.

A US team of researchers in quantum optics and biology showed that a lone photon can start photosynthesis in the purple bacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides, and they are confident it works in plants and algae since all photosynthetic organisms share an evolutionary ancestor and similar processes.

The team says their findings bolster our knowledge of photosynthesis and will lead to a better understanding of the intersection of quantum physics in a wide range of complex biological, chemical, and physical systems, including renewable fuels.

Twistronics could illuminate a path to superconductivity, revolutionize electronic devices, or perhaps hasten the arrival of quantum computing.

IBM in collaboration with UC Berkeley researchers announced a recent breakthrough experiment which indicates that quantum computers will soon surpass classical computers in practical tasks.

Now, the company is taking another major step that has never been done before by it. The company is making the 127-qubit quantum computer publicly available over IBM Cloud.

Continue reading “IBM Makes the Best Quantum Computer Open to Public” »

The company now plans to power its quantum computers with a minimum of 127 qubits.

IBM’s Eagle quantum computer has outperformed a conventional supercomputer when solving complex mathematical calculations. This is also the first demonstration of a quantum computer providing accurate results at a scale of 100+ qubits, a company press release said.

Continue reading “IBM’s Eagle quantum computer just beat a supercomputer at complex math” »