Excitement mounts as we approach a demonstration of quantum supremacy. However a very long road remains to build a fault tolerant quantum computer Quantum hardware announcements continue to come at speed: Google has just announced Bristlecone, a 72 superconducting qubit device (though it remains to be seen if it can maintain the high fidelity performance of its…
A battle is starting for influence over future quantum software platforms. This will have long term implications. Break through announcements in quantum hardware continue to gather apace. While we are still a long way from a universal fault tolerant quantum computer, we are about to enter a period where noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) technology is a reality. A…
Quantum is not a digital technology. By taking us beyond the power of binary 1 and 0, it will have a dramatic effect on business value chains and the structure of economic activity Over the last year, exciting practical progress has shown that achieving the benefits of quantum computing, quantum communications and quantum sensing is now…
The breadth of the UK national quantum technology programme is impressive. Four flavours of qubit technology were on display, but its not just quantum computing , cryptography, sensors and imaging were just as strongly represented. Now in its third year, the momentum really shows. Hand portable and chip scale devices that are at or near…
D-Wave Systems hosted a seminar at SC17, the leading high performance computing mega conference. This featured something still rare in the world of quantum computing – insight from genuine end users. Bo Ewald, President of D-Wave International, introduced the seminar with an accessible survey of the alternative approaches to creating quantum devices. This is a…
Commercial transactions on the Internet and routine cyber security depend on the effectiveness of public key cryptography. Quantum computers will make existing standards obsolete. The impact of this starts now. Estimates vary on when a quantum computer powerful enough to realise this threat will be built. A range of dates from 8 to 20 years…
Articles in the popular press have given competing experimentalists the opportunity for some polite scientific knocking copy A series of recent articles across the New Scientist, Financial Times and Bloomberg quote leading experimental groups, and give insight into the state of reality and hype in the nascent quantum computing sector. Different scientific groups have spent years…
The EU has launched a €1b Future & Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagship initiative in Quantum Technologies. On 6 Nov 2017 the Quantum Flagship High-Level expert group handed over its final report to the European Commission.…
Academics argue that Bitcoin could be subject to attack from quantum computers by 2027. There are plenty of ways to meet this challenge, but given recent experience how easy will the Bitcoin community find it to organise its response? A new paper from Aggarwal, Brennen, Lee et al. starts by underlining the strength of Bitcoin’s main…
On the 24 Oct 2017 the US Congress held a 3 hour hearing on American Leadership in Quantum Technology, These are the highlights. The discussion is a really great presentation of the remarkable things we can expect from the second quantum revolution.…