Quantum Computing 2023 Update

foreign [Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers.com this time it's my seventh annual update on developments in Quantum computing quantum computers process data using Quantum bits or qubits and due to a Quantum phenomena called superposition a qubit can assume a value of one and zero simultaneously in turn a qubit can represent a far wider range of data values and a classical bit always when I make all of these updates there are some people in the comments who say things like Quantum Computing is a fantasy that like nuclear fusion will always be 40 years away and so in this update I thought I'd stress two key points right at the start firstly while the decade Quantum Computing was an elusive dream in the past few years things have dramatically changed indeed there are now a number of companies including IBM and Google which have got working if experimental quantum computers several of these Pioneers also offer Cloud access or Quantum Computing as a service and indeed online access to Quantum Hardware is now available from the two largest cloud computing providers namely Microsoft Azure and Amazon web services both of whom have partnered with Quantum Hardware pioneers so for example here is the price list for the Amazon bracket Quantum Computing service which allows researchers to experiment with Quantum processing units or qpus from ionq oqc Q era Andrew Getty and already companies are using Amazon bracket to develop solutions to real world problems as I hope all of this demonstrates Quantum is already part of the Computing industry if in an early and experimental phase or I guess you could decide to believe that all of these companies are telling us lies although personally I don't think that's the case I do believe that all of these companies have got working quantum computers as a second key point it's critical to understand that quantum computers are being developed to allow us to do new things in new ways not all things in new ways and indeed I'm not aware of any credible researcher who believes that quantum computers will replace classical computers rather quantum computers allow us to run new kinds of application the most fundamental of which is simulating the natural world which is itself quantum mechanical so if we want to run molecular and other simulations which will allow us to improve our understanding of chemistry physics and biology and in turn our practice of material science engineering and Healthcare then we need quantum computers or as Microsoft reminds us throughout history it's been advancements in materials that have shaped human progress and in this context quantum computers may lead us into a new age by accelerating the discovery of new materials what all of this means is that if you're interested in Quantum Computing as a technology that may revolutionize video games then at least for the foreseeable future you're going to be disappointed but if you're interested in Quantum as a radical Computing Frontier then these are very exciting very Innovative times and this is what the rest of this update is all about as we've just noted quantum computers are no longer a fantasy with some current machines now boasting hundreds of qubits for example in November 2022 IBM announced its new 433 qubit Osprey processor with the company maintaining its goal of delivering a system with over 4 000 qubits by 2025. d-wave systems also already have a quantum computer called Advantage with over 5000 qubits however this is based on a technology called Quantum annealing that provides more limited control than IBM's gate-based Hardware future commercial quantum computers will need orders of magnitude more qubits than available in current systems and for these qubits to deliver error-free results this is a major challenge as all of today's quantum computers are based on qubits that are highly susceptible to noise from the environment or component imperfections this makes the qubit highly prone to error and the problem only gets worse the more qubits are involved to give you a feel of the problem in February 2023 Google stated that the error rates of the qubits on our third generation Sycamore processor are typically between one and ten thousand to one in one hundred the problem was succinctly expressed in this 2018 paper by John preskell in this seminal presentation he coined the term noisy intermediate scale Quantum or nisq to describe quantum computers with 50 to a few hundred qubits and in perfect qubit control due to noise as John predicted five years ago today's nisq systems may be able to perform tasks which surpass the capabilities of today's classical digital computers but noise in Quantum Gates will limit the size of quantum circuits that can be executed reliably nisq devices will be useful tools for exploring many body quantum physics and may have other useful applications but Quantum technologists should continue to strive for more accurate Quantum Gates and eventually fully fault tolerant Quantum computing to move Beyond an isq Quantum Pioneers have various options these include refining the application of existing qubit Technologies improving Quantum error correction and developing new qubit technologies and over the past 12 months progress has been reaped in all three of these areas for example in June 2023 an IBM team reported the measurement of accurate results from a noisy 127 cubic quantum computer this day achieved by making advances in the coherence and calibration of its processor as well as their ability to controllably manipulate noise a few months earlier a Google team also revealed progress in Quantum error correction this attempts to reduce the impact of Noise by encoding information across multiple physical qubits to form a logical qubit with a lower error rate or as Google explain Quantum error correction trades many good qubits for one excellent one as reported in February 2023 Google's experiment demonstrated that the more physical qubits are combined into a logical qubit the lower the error rate there are many ways to create a quantum state of matter that may be used for computation one of the most common approaches is to manufacture superconducting qubits with for example IBM creating transmount qubits using the superconducting materials niobium and aluminum patterned on a silicon substrate another common approach is to create trapped iron qubits with for example iron Q using ionized eye turbine atoms in its Quantum Hardware meanwhile photonic qubits may be created by squeezing laser light using ring resonators as detailed in my 2021 update this technique is being pioneered by Xanadu and others and may allow the development of quantum Hardware that does not need to be super cooled yet another alternative is to create silicon spin qubits in Quantum dots as I reported in last year's update this is being worked on by Intel and may allow large-scale Quantum processors to be made using standard microprocessor fabrication techniques in June 2023 Intel released a new 12 Cubit Quantum research silicon chip called tunnel Falls this is being made available to universities and federal Labs who lack the fabrication facilities to create their own test Hardware as Jim Clark Intel's director of quantum Hardware explained 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 a 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 two other technologies that have received much attention in the past 12 months on neutral atom qubits and topological qubits based a major Rana zero modes the first of these is being developed by several companies that include atom Computing and utilizes the nuclear spin of neutral atoms to create neutral atom qubits strong magnetic fields and lasers slow strontium atoms in a vacuum chamber to an almost complete stop as atom Computing further explain because neutral atoms lack electric charge and are not subject to electrostatic forces they can be tightly packed into a computational array of qubits lasers hold the atomic qubits in position and manipulate them to perform Quantum computations wirelessly with pulses of light at only microns apart this arrangement of individually trapped atoms allows for massive scalability sources of error such as environmental conditions and Laser noise can be measured and minimized through diligent engineering efforts with neutral atoms there were no fundamental physics obstacles to achieving sufficiently High Fidelity to enable fault tolerance at scale also banking on an alternative technology to deliver large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers are Microsoft since the late 1990s the company has been investing in many different research teams each working on different kinds of qubit back in March 2022 Microsoft reported that it had demonstrated the physics necessary to create so termed topological qubits this was an extraordinary achievement as whilst the topological phase of matter has been hypothesized since 1937 it had never before been unambiguously produced in the real world but Microsoft claimed to have done this and in November 2022 released an extensive set of experimental data as well as simulations of their topological Quantum devices based on major Rana zero modes in 2023 Microsoft has now clearly come off the quantum fence and is dedicating its efforts to topological quantum as it states a Quantum machine capable of solving many of the hardest problems facing Humanity will ultimately require at least one million stable qubits that can perform one quintillion operations while making at most a single error Microsoft is taking a unique approach by designing such a machine with a new type of qubit a topological qubit our recent physics breakthrough cleared a major hurdle and confirmed that we're on the right path to achieve Quantum at scale in addition to developing topological Hardware Microsoft's Azure Quantum is supporting The Wider Quantum Computing ecosystem and now provides online resources to rival those of IBM and Google which are also excellent so if you want to learn more about quantum computers and how to program them as your Quantum is well worth a visit in particular in June 2023 Microsoft announced a new service called Azure Quantum elements that aims to accelerate scientific discovery by integrating the latest breakthroughs in high performance Computing Ai and Quantum computing personally I find Microsoft's new focus on Quantum Computing as a catalyst a scientific innovation to be very refreshing too long the technology has been lauded as something that may replace classical digital Computing and that really is not the case around the world interest is growing in the potential application of tomorrow's larger scale fault tolerant quantum computers for example in February 2023 the U.S defense Advanced research projects agency or DARPA announced that it'll provide funding to atom Computing Microsoft and PSY Quantum to boost their Research into neutral atom topological and photonic cubic Technologies and in May 2023 the Australian government published its National Quantum strategy this commits funding of up to one billion dollars and sets the goal of building the first error corrected quantum computer in Australia now whether it will actually be Australians who build the world's first large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer we cannot know but I think we can now reasonably predict that such a machine will be built in the next 10 years and we will use it for things like molecular modeling to improve our understanding of chemistry and our practice of Material Science and what this means is in the 2030s the phone in your hand will not have a Quantum processor but it may have a significantly improved battery life due to the application of quantum computing as usual when these updates everything I've talked about is linked down in the video description but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed Please Subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music]

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 130,807

Keywords: quantum computing, quantum cloud, QCaaS, Microsoft quantum, topological qubits, qubits, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Google quantum, IBM quantum, Intel quantum, neutral atom qubits, IonQ, Atom computing, quantum computing progress, quantum error correction, fault-tolerant quantum computer, commercial quantum computer, quantum computing review, quantum computing summary, Xanadu, photonic qubits, trapped-ion qubits, silicon spin qubits, D-Wave Systems, types of qubit

Id: dOBe5pES30k

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2023