Nathan’s Quantum Tech Newsletter: №22
This is what I’ve seen in quantum tech in the last month:
00 🗞 Tech News
01 📰 Research Highlights
10 🎲 Bonus Links
00 🗞 Tech News
Google AI researchers performed on a quantum chip a calculation allegedly unfeasible on current supercomputers. While the report on such results is still in peer review, a copy of the submitted manuscript was uploaded to a NASA server, then taken down, and eventually has widely circulated in the research community. A good explainer on the quantum supremacy experiment and its rationale is given by quantum computing theorist Scott Aaronson. Link
IBM Q is scheduling to put online a 53-qubit quantum computer within the next month, raising the number of quantum computers that have been connected to the cloud to 14. The company also estimates that over 200 research papers used their computers. Link
Along Google Research AI, another theoretical research group has formed around X, the moonshot factory, formerly known as Google X.
Q-CTRL, an Australian spin-off of Michael Biercuck physics group at the University of Sidney, raised $15 million in Series A funding. Link
Alpine Quantum Technologies, the ion-based startup based in Innsbruck, Austria, will use Google’s Cirq open-source library as its high-level interface. This partnership may mark a difference between IBM’s and Google’s approach toward integrating with other quantum computing hardware. Link
On the open-source community side:
- the first European Qiskit camp was organized by IBM in Switzerland, with a future one scheduled in Japan this Fall. Link
- one event by CERN is coming up in October. Link
- a quantum Hackaton is scheduled in Toronto in November 2019. Link
On networking events:
- The Swiss Quantum Industry Day is days away. Link
- A corporate — venture capital meeting will be organized in New York in November 2019. Link
On research schemes:
- Princeton announces a Quantum Initiative effort. Link
- The NSF is establishing a foundry at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Link
USRA and NASA have begun a monthly newsletter for researchers on papers about noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Link
01 📰 Research Highlights
A superposition experiment involving massive molecules with thousands of atoms has been performed at the University of Vienna. The results of this groundbreaking are published in Nature Physics. Related pioneering experiments had been performed in the group of Anton Zeilinger with fullerene molecules made of sixty carbon atoms, twenty years ago. Such double-slit experiments showed that not only light, but also massive particles, behave both as a particle and a waves. The current research raises the classical-quantum boundary higher, displaying diffraction patterns that measure the interference nature of the macro-molecules path. Link
10 🎲 Bonus Links
Celebrating Enrico Fermi. Link
Sean Carroll’s Op-Ed in the NY Times for all those who dont surrender to “shut up and calculate!” Link
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