Quantinuum

Quantum computing promises to help us understand chemistry in its purest form – ultimately leading to a better understanding of everything from drug development to superconductors. But before we can do any of that, researchers in computational quantum chemistry have to create the basic building blocks for understanding a chemical system: they must prepare the initial state of a system, apply various effects to the system through time, then measure the resulting output. The first problem, called “state preparation” is a tricky one – many approaches exist, but they all have difficulties. Recently, researchers at Quantinuum elucidated a very appealing approach to state preparation using a clever averaging approach. A nice aspect of this approach is that it has guaranteed “convergence” – ultimately this means that, unlike other approaches, it works all the time. This new approach has also been shown to be possible on near-term quantum computers: it does not require too many gates or computational time, and it scales well with the system size. This algorithm is designed with Quantinuum’s world-leading hardware in mind, as it requires all-to-all connectivity. Combined with our industry-leading gate fidelities, this new approach is opening the door to many fascinating applications in chemistry, physics, and beyond. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/e83i94iC Read the scientific paper here: https://lnkd.in/ehSsdviY Access our hardware here: https://lnkd.in/eV6b6nWw

This week, Quantinuum's chief scientist Bob Coecke is giving a talk at the UCL Computer Science Festival of Engineering, organized by Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, on "From quantum in high school to interpretable quantum AI". Bob and our Compositional Intelligence team are exploring the intersection of explainable AI with interpretable models, and natural language processing on quantum computers. Their work includes a current collaboration with UCL and the BBC to investigate the potential of using QNLP for content discovery and retrieval within the vast BBC archives. This is a free public event and virtual tickets are available via the link below:

Scaling up quantum computers from dozens of qubits to millions is one of the most complex challenges across our industry. We’ve just published a paper that can have a huge impact on how quickly and efficiently we scale towards industrial relevance, via something called “safe lattice surgery” on high-rate codes.    Read the scientific paper by here: https://lnkd.in/eZUBTm7d   To run something like Shor’s famous algorithm, scientists have estimated that one would need thousands of “logical” (error corrected) qubits, which are each made from multiple physical qubits. There are almost infinite ways to construct logical qubits out of physical qubits, but some approaches have huge implications for how quickly #quantum computers can scale up. For example, one approach might take 20 physical qubits to build one logical qubit, while another might take only 5 physical qubits per logical qubit. When your scheme takes fewer physical qubits per logical qubit, scientists call it a “high-rate code”, and it is these “codes” that we are interested in developing. Of course, there’s no free lunch - we typically need extra qubits to do computation, which add an additional overhead in terms of physical qubit number.     Once you have logical qubits, to perform “universal” computation, you also need things called “magic state distillation” and “lattice surgery” (there are other options, but for this post we will focus on this). Until our latest paper, scientists had only figured out how to do lattice surgery on “low-rate” codes (which we want to move past), or on high-rate codes but very inefficiently (using many ancillary qubits). In our new paper, we’ve developed an algorithmic method for performing safe lattice surgery on high-rate codes, efficiently.    Our leadership in quantum error correction (QEC) would be impossible without our world-record commercial hardware fidelity. Quantum hardware that doesn’t have fidelity at our level will not be able to benefit from QEC in any meaningful way – until your hardware has good enough fidelity, QEC operations will only add noise. Our world-class fidelity, combined with our flexible QCCD architecture offering all-to-all connectivity, mid-circuit measurement, and feed-forward means that our team has an ideal playground for exploring the #QEC landscape, as we have proven over and over again.   Explore our publications: https://lnkd.in/eVna3sgX   Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/eZUBTm7d   Access the H-Series hardware here: https://lnkd.in/eV6b6nWw

We are partnering with STFC Hartree Centre, one of Europe’s largest supercomputing centers dedicated to industry engagement, to advance quantum innovation and development in the UK. Read the full announcement: https://lnkd.in/gDMgUQef Through this partnership, the Hartree Centre will have unparalleled access to Quantinuum H-Series quantum computers, via both the cloud and on-premise. These systems, which promise the greatest fidelity in quantum computing, include the highest-performing quantum computer available today and the only quantum processor with a proven path to commercial scale. UK industrial and scientific users are further enabled to explore quantum advantage and drive advancements in fields like quantum chemistry, computational biology, quantum artificial intelligence and quantum-augmented cybersecurity.

Congratulations to our Chief Scientist Prof Bob Coecke on receiving the LICS Test of Time Award! The Logic In Computer Science (IEEE-LICS) symposium awards this every year to a paper from 20 years ago that has had the greatest lasting impact. This is the first time that the test-of-time award has been given to a paper in #quantumcomputing. This year, they selected Prof Coecke and Prof Samson Abramsky’s 2004 paper “A categorical semantics of quantum protocols”, an iconic paper that is at the root of work we have done in ZX-calculus, Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP), quantum causality, and even cognition. It has had a broad impact, leading to the use of ZX-like graphical calculus and diagrammatic reasoning in many disciplines, from computer science to physics. ZX-calculus has flourished and is widely used in quantum computing today, for instance in quantum circuit optimization (including in our opensource developer toolkit TKET) and lattice surgery. It is described by many as having particularly useful characteristics for studying fundamental science. A paper co-authored by Peter Shor observed there’s a growing interest in ZX-calculus because it “can explicitly visualize properties of circuits and entanglement in an intuitive manner”. Recently, Carlo Rovelli expressed his hope that such “powerful conceptual and technical tools” can be used to translate quantum gravity problems into quantum computing problems. To quote the LICS committee: “This extraordinary paper has had a major impact on the development of quantum computation in the logic and computation community. It has led to new algebraic and diagrammatic ways of thinking about quantum computation and has stimulated research on quantum programming languages, calculi for reasoning about quantum computation, and lately even error correction.” We are immensely proud to have luminaries like Prof Coecke working with us as we work to shape the future. Congratulations Bob Coecke! LICS Test of Time Award: https://lnkd.in/e-jUMnNt Read “A categorical semantics of quantum protocols”: https://lnkd.in/eEKWPvi2  An introduction to ZX-calculus, tutorials and Python tools: https://zxcalculus.com/ #NaturalLanguageProcessing

Colorado is leading the world in #quantum technology and with new investments in the Elevate Quantum Tech Hub, the Mountain West’s quantum ecosystem is set to keep growing. We are proud to be a part of this community! With Colorado as one of the homes of our industry-leading H-Series quantum computers, Quantinuum is committed to innovation, excellence, and driving advancements in #quantumcomputing and its potential applications every day. Check out this Denver7 (KMGH-TV) article for more details: https://lnkd.in/gVeAZ4Zv

Congratulations to all the members of Elevate Quantum! The consortium was just awarded $127 million in federal and state funding to secure US leadership in Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming for the most important technology of the 21st century! Over the next decade, these programs will support 10,000+ new jobs, skills training for 30,000 workers, and extensive infrastructure projects throughout the #MountainWest region. Quantinuum is a proud member of the Mountain West quantum community and the #ElevateQuantum Consortium, which includes Atom Computing, FormFactor Inc., Infleqtion, University of Colorado, Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory and others.

Quantinuum and University of Colorado Boulder just made quantum error correction easier. Read more in this blogpost: https://lnkd.in/eeBpediv We’ve recently published a scientific paper describing the implementation of a never-before-used quantum error correction code to create four logical qubits and hit the “break even.”       This is an important milestone in the quest to build quantum computers that can overcome errors and deliver accurate results – which is what today’s supercomputers do.  It also builds on several recent quantum error corrections advancements in recent months by the Quantinuum team, such as our joint announcement with Microsoft where we showed error rates reduced by a factor of 800x thanks to Microsoft’s innovative error correction scheme.     This collaboration is yet another example of how Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming are leading the world in #quantumcomputing.  We are proud to be part of the robust #quantum ecosystem in #Colorado, #NewMexico and #Wyoming.  Read the scientific paper here: https://lnkd.in/e9KSmKXJ Access our H-Series hardware here: https://lnkd.in/eV6b6nWw

“The tipping point is NOW because we have quantum computers that can’t be simulated in certain areas.”    That was the assessment of Ilyas Khan, KSG, founder, vice-chair and chief product officer of Quantinuum, at The Economist’s Commercialising Quantum event earlier this month in London.    Ilyas was speaking with Tom Standage, deputy editor at The Economist, and Robert Bruckmeier, general manager for computing and AI, at the BMW Group, during the session, “The Industrialisation of Quantum: Getting Ready to Benefit Business and Society”.    The conversation covered a lot of ground in a short time, from BMW’s longstanding commitment to exploring quantum computing to Quantinuum’s many recent industry-leading performance achievements with its H-Series systems.      Tom asked if BMW is seeing useful results now from its work with Quantinuum, and Robert said they are gaining insights that would have been difficult to achieve with classical computing alone.     Robert described how BMW’s teams are conducting research in quantum chemistry, including hydrogen fuel cells and lithium-ion batteries – simulations in aerodynamics that are challenging for today’s HPCs as well as multi-physics simulations to enhance automotive design.    To view the session, please go here: https://lnkd.in/eYeHNC9e

With the #Olympics kicking off in less than a month, we’re reflecting on the #BIGQuantumHackathon in Paris, where teams tackled applications of quantum computing in the sports industry. Quantinuum was honored to work with industry sponsor Fédération Française de Tennis for analysis of ‘real time quantum-powered object detection to improve the judging systems of tennis competitions’. This was just one of many interesting applications analyzed by developers at the event. While these use cases may not benefit from #quantum advantage, to realize the full potential of quantum computing, it’s important that organizations across industries develop ideas for real-world applications in parallel to technological advancements. Thank you to QuantX, aqora, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), GENCI, HQI France, Le Lab Quantique, Les Maisons du Quantique, and others for hosting the #BQH2024 hackathon.