Quantum Untangled: The Rubidium Maze
The Pentagon's ongoing quantum encryption drive, a Hanseatic conference, and a breakthrough at Harvard.
A shorter edition this week, readers, after the frenzy of activity and speculation following IBM’s quantum conference and as we enter the languorous, mulled wine-fuelled Christmas period. Still, as the old saying definitely goes, quantum physics stops for no man, and the past seven days have still been marked by scientific breakthroughs, festive German get-togethers and new commitments to harnessing quantum to solve the problems of tomorrow.
DoD gets serious about quantum encryption
The US Department of Defense has revealed more about its plans to quantum-proof its systems, according to this interesting new piece in NextGov. Speaking for the US Air Force, its principal cyber advisor Wanda Jones-Heath said that migrating DoD’s encryption from current cryptographic standards to post-quantum is a “mission imperative.” The Navy’s quantum computing lead Dan Gunlycke feels the same way, adding that the Naval Research Laboratory is busy finding new ways to fortify the service’s networks against nefarious quantum hackers — and partner up with organisations in the private sector. More here.
Hansa-tastic
Quantum fever is gripping Hamburg. A recent conference in Germany’s pre-eminent port city brought together investors and policymakers with experts in logistics, data science and cybersecurity to examine what kind of potential quantum solutions have for the industrial behemoths of Mitteleuropa. As it turns out, there’s quite a lot.
“Quantum computing holds solutions to certain previously unsolvable problems,” argued Lufthansa Industry Solutions’ Dr Joseph Doetsch. How to master gate scheduling for passenger aircraft is one surprising problem where quantum computing could make a real difference. “If 200 aircraft are to be allocated to 50 gates,” explained Doetsch, “the total number of possible combinations is higher than there are atoms in the universe.”
Cue smoking GPUs. High-performance quantum computers, by contrast, would probably overcome the kind of difficulties encountered by their classical antecedents in this area. They’d probably do the same for route planning in logistics, argued Dr Anisa Rizvanolli of Fraunhofer CML, which has already begun running similar calculations on quantum annealers in the US. “We book computing time there and gain initial experience with the new technology,” Rizvanolli told Hamburg News, which also revealed that work has begun on a similar machine in the former Hansa entrepot. Beobachten Sie diesen Bereich!
How do you like those rubidium apples?
A team at Harvard claims to have created the first “programmable, logical quantum processor” using a neutral atom array in a paper published in Nature. To generalise the discovery in a way that only Quantum Untangled can, the system performs its calculations using a block of super-cooled rubidium atoms, the entangled pairs of which are manipulated using lasers. The unit is capable of harnessing 48 logical qubits more efficiently, the team argues, than other methods of controlling physical qubits.
“This breakthrough is a tour de force of quantum engineering and design,” the National Science Foundation’s Denise Caldwell told The Harvard Gazette. “The team has not only accelerated the development of quantum information processing by using neutral atoms, but opened a new door to explorations of large-scale logical qubit devices, which could enable transformative benefits for science and society as a whole.”
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