From all things One and from One all things, wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago. He was describing monism, the ancient idea that all is one that, fundamentally, everything we see or experience is an aspect of one unified whole. Heraclitus wasnt the first, nor the last, to advocate the idea. The ancient Egyptians believed in an all-encompassing but elusive unity symbolised by the goddess Isis, often portrayed with a veil and worshipped as all that has been and is and shall be and the mother and father of all things.

This worldview also follows in straightforward fashion from the findings of quantum mechanics (QM), the uncanny physics of subatomic particles that departs from the classical physics of Isaac Newton and experience in the everyday world. QM, which holds that all matter and energy exist as interchangeable waves and particles, has delivered computers, smartphones, nuclear energy, laser scanners and arguably the best-confirmed theory in the entirety of science. We need the mathematics underlying QM to make sense of matter, space and time. Two processes of quantum physics lead directly to the notion of an interconnected universe and a monistic foundation to nature overall: entanglement, natures way of integrating parts into a whole, and the topic of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics; and decoherence, caused by the loss of quantum information, and the reason why we experience so little quantum weirdness in our daily lives.

Yet, despite the throughline in philosophy and physics, the majority of Western thinkers and scientists have long rejected the idea that reality is literally unified, or nature and the Universe a system of one. From judges in the Inquisition (1184-1834) to quantum physicists today, the thought that a single system underlies everything has been too odd to believe. In fact, though philosophers have been proposing monism for thousands of years, and QM is, after all, an experimental science, Western culture has regularly lashed out against the concept and punished those promoting the idea.

It wasnt always that way. In ancient times, the concept of monism held more weight in the popular mind. Philosophers in the school of Pythagoras (c570-490 BCE), renowned for his alleged discovery of the geometrical relation among the three sides of a right triangle, identified the number one as the centre of the Universe. Heraclitus contemporary Parmenides (c520-460 BCE) believed in reality as a timeless one, that is and that is not not to be. And Plato, arguably the most influential philosopher ever, is said to have taught monism as a secret doctrine at his academy, to be disseminated only orally. Indeed, monism later evolved into a trademark of his school, and Neoplatonists such as Plotinus (c205-270 CE) wrote about the one that is all things and beings generator. Around the same time, mystery cults popular in late antiquity advocated a hidden unity behind the many gods of the Greco-Roman polytheistic pantheon, and understood the different deities as representations of the various facets of a single, unified reality.

Later on, philosophical ideas derived from Platos monistic instincts competed with Christianity to become the dominant worldview of the Roman Empire. Christianity prevailed.

Even then, Christianity adopted Platonic ideas by identifying the monistic One with God. But Christianity drew also on dualistic philosophies such as Manichaeism, which advocated a world caught in an epic struggle between good and evil. This is how concepts such as God and devil, heaven and hell, or angels and demons received their prominent role among Christian beliefs. At the same time, the monistic influences were pushed into an otherworldly beyond. The Christian God was understood as different from the natural world that he governs from outside.

A student who claimed that God, the world, and nature, are but one thing was hanged for blasphemy

With the Christian Church rising to political power and the fall of the Roman Empire, much of antiquitys culture and philosophy got lost, and monism got suppressed as a heresy. If all is One, God gets conflated with the world, and medieval theology understood that as atheism or a devaluation of God.

When in 855 John Scotus Eriugena, a medieval philosopher at the court of the Frankish emperor Charles the Bald, described God as an indivisible unity holding together all things, he got condemned and his books forbidden. Sure, these monistic ideas inspired philosophers, but theologians saw them as an intrusion into the realm of religion. By the 13th century, a group of scholars in Paris had resorted to the stance that there exists a double truth: that what is right in natural philosophy may be wrong at the same time in theology, and vice versa.

These conflicts framed the relationship between religion and the developing sciences. After Nicolaus Copernicus advocated a heliocentric model of the planetary system in 1543, proposing that Earth and planets revolved around the Sun, instead of the Universe around Earth, his book was suspended by the Inquisition in 1616; for more than 200 years, it was allowed to be published only in editions that stressed it presented just a mathematical model but no statement about reality. That same year, Galileo Galilei was warned by the cardinal Robert Bellarmine, an inquisitor and one of the judges who had condemned Giordano Bruno to be burnt at the stake, to teach the heliocentric model not as truth but only as a hypothesis.

In 1600, Bruno, an early advocate of the Copernican model, was burned alive in Rome. Among his heresies was his monistic philosophy, affirming that the whole is one and that Nature is none other than God in things. In 1619, Lucilio Vanini, who had preached a religion of nature where a leaf of grass was proof of God, got his tongue cut out and was strangled at the stake, his body burned in Toulouse. And in 1697, Thomas Aikenhead, a student who claimed that God, the world, and nature, are but one thing, was hanged for blasphemy in Edinburgh.

Science in those early days often emerged as a sort of soft monism. Johannes Kepler, who discovered that Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun in elliptical orbits, tried to understand nature in terms of harmonies and symmetries. Brunos influence and the ideas of monism directly inspired his efforts to develop a unified theory and find harmonic, beautiful patterns in the natural world.

The monist influence was even more apparent in the work of Newton, best known for his theory of gravity. One of Newtons most important accomplishments was the insight that gravity acts universally on all bodies on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe. He explicitly compared this feature with the idea of an all-encompassing divinity that he adopted from the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth. One and the same divinity [exercises] its powers in all bodies whatsoever, Newton wrote.

Michael Faraday, who proposed force fields were permeating the Universe, made significant steps toward the unification of electricity and magnetism a monistic point of view, indeed.

Albert Einstein, who gave us such concepts as the curved universe and space-time, believed that the separation of humans from the rest of the Universe was essentially an optical delusion of consciousness.

Monism has resurfaced again and again by inspiring humanitys greatest creations and creators across the arts. Mozarts opera The Magic Flute (1791) included a eulogy of Isis. Beethoven kept the quote I am all that is, that has been and will be, and no mortal has ever lifted my veil, attributed to Isis, in a frame on his desk. The Romantic poets from Goethe to Coleridge to Wordsworth describe the longing for a reconciliation of ego and the world within nature.

Despite all this, the hard line of the Church stuck: monism could influence science and inspire our greatest art, but the idea that it quite literally described nature was rejected by the overwhelming majority through the years. To the present day, we tend to believe that monism and nature, or monism and science, dont belong together; that the hypothesis of all is One simply isnt proper science at all.

If anything should convince us to change our mind, it is the experimental science of quantum mechanics and its underlying mathematics. One famous feature of QM is that there is no strict separation between particles and waves. What had been considered as a particle before, for example an electron, can sometimes behave as a wave, while waves (such as, for example, light) can absorb and emit energy in discrete portions, understood as particle-like quanta. In contrast to a particle though, a wave doesnt exist in a specific place. It stretches out over the surface of a pond or the expanse of the Universe; it is non-local, in physics lingo. A quantum object described as a wave exists in several places simultaneously until it gets measured. In that instant, the object seems to collapse into one of its potential locations.

This leads to the weirdest aspect of QM entanglement, a property of quantum systems made up of two or more particles. According to the quantum pioneer Erwin Schrdinger writing in 1935, entanglement is the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought.

Consider observing a wave pattern on your pond that you know results from two ripples combined, such as two stones dropped into the water. Just by looking at the water surface, you wont be able to tell what these individual ripples were to start. For instance, the pattern could have arisen from two stones causing two equal swells in the water, or from a small stone causing a third of the swell and a larger stone creating two-thirds.

Taking this logic at face value, nothing we see really exists; there are no particles or physicists or cats or dogs

The same is true for entangled quantum systems: you may know the complete system perfectly well but at the same time know nothing about its constituents until we pin them down by experiment, measuring them. In such an experiment, the very act of measurement would destroy the original whole.

It was Schrdinger who clearly summarised what entanglement means:

Entanglement is QMs way of integrating parts into a whole and, when you apply entanglement to the entire Universe, you end up with Heraclitus tenet From all things One. Taking this logic at face value, nothing we see around us really exists; there are no particles or physicists or cats or dogs. The only thing that truly exists is the Universe as a whole.

Yet, while this logic is easy to follow, the conclusion seems bizarre, and is far from a general consensus, even among physicists. In fact, it sparked a controversy that can be traced back to the early history of QM when, in 1927, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg realised that one can never experience both the particle and wave aspects of a quantum object at the same time. Heisenbergs friend and collaborator Wolfgang Pauli tried to illustrate this finding by saying one could look at nature with two different eyes, seeing either particles or waves, but if the observer tried to open both eyes together, they would go astray. This seemed to suggest that reality is fundamentally unobservable, just like the veiled Egyptian goddess Isis. But physics is an experimental science. As a consequence, physicists arent easily convinced about the existence of a hidden quantum reality, even if it may unify the experiences of things such as particles or waves.

Bohr, Heisenberg and Pauli at least remained unconvinced. When they tried to make sense out of quantum mechanics, they came to the conclusion that what we see is real and that there is no underlying, more fundamental quantum reality hiding behind. According to this Copenhagen interpretation, QM doesnt describe a deeper reality but merely our incomplete knowledge of nature.

Schrdingers theoretical wave function, the mathematical expression that describes the different probabilities a quantum object has of being in a given state or location, wasnt accepted as a model of nature but understood as merely a tool to predict what our measurement devices would register. There is no quantum world, Bohr reportedly affirmed. For many years to come, this view became the orthodox interpretation about what QM meant.

From the time Schrdingers paper on entanglement was published in 1935, physicists could have adopted a monistic interpretation of QM, or at least have accepted it as a major contender for Bohrs instrumental interpretation that QM was merely a tool. Yet it appears as if Heisenberg and Bohr, as soon as they had discovered this strange, new quantum reality that was underlying our everyday world and unifying everything in the Universe, shied away from setting out to explore this uncharted territory. Instead, they decided to declare it nonexistent.

This reaction is even more baffling since physicists, of all people, werent completely unaware of the monistic implications of QM. For example, when in 1947 Bohr received the Order of the Elephant, Denmarks highest honour, he designed his own coat of arms that featured a yin and yang symbol, the pictorial representation of the monistic Taoist philosophy that seemingly opposite forces in nature are actually complementary pieces of a fundamental whole on a deeper level of understanding. In a similar spirit, Heisenberg titled his autobiography Der Teil und das Ganze (1969), or The Part and the Whole.

More concretely, the physicist David Bohm wrote in his popular textbook Quantum Theory (1951) that QM requires that we give up the idea that the world can correctly be analysed into distinct parts and replace it with the assumption that the entire universe is basically a single, indivisible unit. By the 1970s, Fritjof Capras bestseller The Tao of Physics (1975) was comparing quantum physics with East Asian spirituality. So why were the monistic implications of quantum physics not taken seriously? Why was quantum physics an apt mathematical model, but considered insufficient to describe the contours of nature itself?

There are many reasons why this didnt happen.

For one thing, despite the monistic inclinations of visionaries like Newton and Kepler, the notion that all is One usually isnt understood as a meaningful statement in science. This One isnt directly observable, and science is an experimental endeavour. But more than that, the Western mind was inclined to restrict science to problem-solving while reserving the absolute and final answers for religion. The mindset has been internalised to this day, even by people who arent necessarily religious themselves.

Whats more, it didnt really seem to matter what the quantum-mechanical wave function implied. The formulas and predictions of quantum physics worked perfectly well and could be applied successfully to the various emerging research fields in nuclear, particle and solid-state physics, irrespective of what one believed about its underlying reality. Moreover, for many years, no one truly understood what happened during a quantum measurement and how quantum mechanics was related to our everyday experience in a world made of large objects existing in definite shapes and places.

This situation changed only around 1970 when the physicist Heinz-Dieter Zeh in Germany discovered a process known as decoherence, which is important to virtually any branch of modern physics. Decoherence protects our daily-life experience from too much quantum weirdness. And it realises the last part of Heraclitus tenet: from all things One.

It is as if decoherence opens a zipper between parallel universes

Decoherence happens when a quantum object interacts with its environment for instance, when a particle like an electron, a human observer or measurement device, and the environment get entangled. If the quantum object is a particle existing in two different locations (possible if it takes the form of a wave) each of them is linked to a corresponding state of the measurement device recording the particle in the respective position.

While these possible realities are superposed in the entangled whole, they unravel from the perspective of the observer who doesnt know the exact state of the environment, which arguably is the entire rest of the Universe. It is as if you observe your garden through a partitioned window: nature looks divided into separate pieces, but this is an artefact of your perspective.

From the observers perspective immersed in their own reality (called the frog perspective by the cosmologist Max Tegmark) the measurement device might describe two realities based on mathematical probabilities in the wave function the particle could be located at position A with a measurement device observing this location, or the particle could be found at position B with another device recording this position.

Zehs discovery endorsed a controversial view of quantum mechanics, proposed by the physicist Hugh Everett, that became famous under the misleading label many-worlds interpretation. According to Everett, quantum measurements dont have only a single outcome. Instead, all outcomes allowed in quantum mechanics are realised, albeit in parallel realities. It is as if decoherence opens a zipper between parallel universes. On a more fundamental level though, Everetts interpretation doesnt describe many classical worlds but rather a single quantum universe, governed by a universal wave function. If a hypothetical observer could see the entire Universe from the outside with all its possibilities revealed, the cosmos would manifest as a single quantum object. That, metaphorically speaking, would be the bird perspective, Tegmark says.

As remarkable as Everetts and Zehs conclusions were, they werent appreciated by their physicist peers. Instead, for decades any deeper enquiry in the foundations of quantum mechanics was discouraged, and anyone who dared to question Bohrs orthodox interpretation encountered a toxic blend of hostility and dogmatic pragmatism. The attitude was fittingly summarised in 1989 by the physicist David Mermin as Shut up and calculate! The motto reflected the pressure on 20th-century students to adopt QM as a tool instead of wasting their time with metaphysical pondering or any effort to find its expression in reality.

John Clauser, one of the recipients of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum entanglement, described how a very powerful stigma began to develop within the physics community towards anyone who sacrilegiously was critical of quantum theorys fundamentals. Lon Rosenfeld, a close collaborator of Bohrs, characterised Everett as undescribably [sic!] stupid and claimed he could not understand the simplest things in quantum mechanics. Around the same time, Zeh who discovered decoherence was informed by his advisor, a Nobel Prize winner, that any further activities on this subject would end [his] academic career! Zeh stressed the parallels between the Inquisitions conservative stance and the dogmatic antirealism of many physicists today:

Thus, even after decoherence had explained how our everyday experience can follow from a monistic quantum reality, the idea remained the outsider view of a small group of renegade physicists. And, in fact, for most of us, the notion of an all-encompassing One doesnt feel like proper science. It comes with a scent of New Age bullshit.

But why does this idea sound so bizarre to us? To understand this bias, we have to leave quantum mechanics for a moment and look back to how monism evolved in Europe over the past 800 years. It turns out, the controversy about how to interpret QM is part of the larger story the conflict about who was entitled to define the foundation of reality: religion, or science?

According to Everett and Zeh, the fundamental description of the Universe is a single entangled state, described by a universal wave function. Everything we experience in our daily lives emerges from this fundamental quantum reality.

If this is correct, it implies that the traditional approach of physics to understand things in terms of constituents doesnt work anymore. If physicists explain how everyday objects such as chairs, tables and books are made of atoms, atoms are composed of atomic nuclei and electrons, atomic nuclei contain protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons consist of quarks, they ignore that these particles arent fundamental but just abstractions from the fundamental whole.

If there exists but a single thing in the Universe, then space doesnt make sense any more

Instead, the most fundamental description of the Universe has to start with the Universe itself, understood as an entangled quantum object. Indeed, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for experiments that probe correlations between particles separated by large distances yet connected to each other based on entanglement.

This view also requires us to rethink our notion of space and time. If there exists but a single thing in the Universe, then space, often understood as the relative order of things, doesnt make sense any more. Nor is it easy to imagine this single object evolving in time. Accordingly, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, describing the quantum mechanical wave function of the Universe and the starting point for much of Stephen Hawkings work on cosmology, describes a timeless universe.

Entanglement also plays a crucial role in the most advanced approaches to quantum computing and the search for a theory of quantum gravity, in which entanglement creates connections between distant regions of space-time. Just a few weeks before the new Nobel laureates were honoured in Stockholm in 2022, a different team of distinguished scientists had a paper published in Nature that described a process on Googles quantum computer that could be interpreted as some kind of wormhole, a tunnel connecting far-away regions in space. Although the wormhole realised in this recent experiment exists only in a two-dimensional toy universe, it hints at an intimate relationship between quantum entanglement and proximity in space, and thus could constitute a breakthrough for future research at the forefront of physics.

The 3,000-year-old concept of monism may actually help modern physicists in their struggle to find a theory of quantum gravity and make sense out of black holes, the Higgs boson, and the early Universe. Chances are high that we witness the beginning of a new era where science is informed by monism and the Universe is perceived as a unified whole.

This Essay was made possible through the support of a grant to Aeon+Psyche from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. Funders to Aeon+Psyche are not involved in editorial decision-making.

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Scientists at Forschungszentrum Jlich have fabricated a new type of transistor from a germaniumtin alloy that has several advantages over conventional switching elements. Charge carriers can move faster in the material than in silicon or germanium, which enables lower voltages in operation. The transistor thus appears to be a promising candidate for future low-power, high-performance chips, and possibly also for the development of future of quantum computers.

Over the past 70 years, the number of transistors on a chip has doubled approximately every two years according to Moores Law, which is still valid today. The circuits have become correspondingly smaller, but an end to this development appears to be in sight. We have now reached a stage where structures are only 2 to 3 nanometers in size. This is approximately equal to the diameter of 10 atoms, which takes us to the limits of what is feasible. It doesnt get much smaller than this, says Qing-Tai Zhao of the Peter Grnberg Institute (PGI-9) at Forschungszentrum Jlich.

For some time now, researchers have been looking for a substitute for silicon, the primary material used in the semiconductor industry. The idea is to find a material that has more favourable electronic properties and can be used to achieve the same performance with larger structures, the professor explains.

The research is in part focused on germanium, which was already being used in the early days of the computer era. Electrons can move much faster in germanium than in silicon, at least in theory. However, Qing-Tai Zhao and his colleagues have now gone one step further. To optimize the electronic properties even further, they incorporated tin atoms into the germanium crystal lattice. The method was developed several years ago at the Peter Grnberg Institute (PGI-9) of Forschungszentrum Jlich.

The germaniumtin system we have been testing makes it possible to overcome the physical limitations of silicon technology, says Qing-Tai Zhao. In experiments, the germaniumtin transistor exhibits an electron mobility that is 2.5 times higher than a comparable transistor made of pure germanium.

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Another advantage of the new material alloy is that it is compatible with the existing CMOS process for chip fabrication. Germanium and tin come from the same main group in the periodic table as silicon. The germanium-tin transistors could therefore be integrated directly into conventional silicon chips with existing production lines.

Apart from classical digital computers, quantum computers could also benefit from the germaniumtin transistor. For some time, there have been efforts to integrate parts of the control electronics directly on the quantum chip, which is operated inside a quantum computer at temperatures close to absolute zero. Measurements suggest that a transistor made of germanium-tin will perform significantly better under these conditions than those made of silicon.

The challenge is to find a semiconductor whose switching can still be very fast with low voltages at very low temperatures, explains Qing-Tai Zhao. For silicon, this switching curve flattens out below 50 Kelvin. Then, the transistors need a high voltage and thus a high power, which ultimately leads to failures of the sensitive quantum bits because of the heating. Germaniumtin performs better at these temperatures in measurements down to 12 Kelvin, and there are hopes to use the material at even lower temperatures, says Qing-Tai Zhao.

In addition, the germaniumtin transistor is a further step towards optical on-chip data transmission. The transmission of information with light signals is already standard in many data networks because it is considerably faster and more energy-efficient than data transfer via electrical conductors. In the field of micro- and nanoelectronics, however, data is usually still sent electrically. Colleagues from the Jlich working group of Dr. Dan Buca have already developed a germanium-tin laser in the past that opens up the possibility to transmit data optically directly on a silicon chip. The germanium-tin transistor, along these lasers, provides a promising solution for the monolithic integration of nanoelectronics and photonics on a single chip.

Reference:Liu M, Junk Y, Han Y, et al. Vertical GeSn nanowire MOSFETs for CMOS beyond silicon. Commun Eng. 2023;2(1):1-9. doi:10.1038/s44172-023-00059-2

This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

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UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is reportedly about to follow in the footsteps of the US and several European governments by announcing a funding package designed to build up the countrys domestic semiconductor industry, according to a report this week from Politico.

While the exact amount of the funding could change, according to Politicos sources, a topline figure of 1 billion ($1.25 billion) is expected. The UK governments Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is thought to be the prime mover behind the policy, and Sunak is said to be planning to unveil it in next months G7 meeting in Japan.

Government efforts to build domestic semiconductor manufacturing capacity have been spurred largely by the events of the pandemic, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing US semiconductor trade dispute with China. The former event, thanks to the consequent enormous upsurge of remote work, created a new wave of semiconductor demand, highlighting the dependence of the global technology sector on foundries in East Asia. US policy dating back to the Trump administration then created a new set of barriers to exports from China, while the invasion of Ukraine further exacerbated strains on the global supply chain.

Hence, in an increasingly unsettled geopolitical situation, national governments whose countries depend on a large supply of computer chips have taken increasingly dramatic steps to either build new production capabilities or buttress existing ones. The US own CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law by President Biden last summer, appropriated more than $52 billion for a range of incentives, including $39 billion for manufacturing incentives designed to keep semiconductor fabs run by US companies in the country, and provide major sums in subsidy for companies looking to create new ones.

The UKs plan would fit in with UK policy regarding the technology sector. During his Spring Statement, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt announced several measures, including R&D support for small to midsize businesses in the form of tax credits, an annual $1.25 million award for excellence in AI research, and $3.12 billion in financial support for the governments 10-year plan for quantum computing development. Additionally, the government plans to offer new childcare subsidies for tech workers, and to implement retraining initiatives designed to allow older workers to participate in the tech sector.

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UK expected to offer $1.25 billion for nation's semiconductor industry - Computerworld

Enterprises can take advantage of D-Waves newly published optimization improvement through a hardware-sharing cloud service.

One of the challenges in quantum computing is overcoming 3D spin-glass optimization limitations, which can slow down quantum simulation meant to solve real-world optimization problems. An experimental solution is D-Waves Advantage quantum computer, running spin-glass dynamics (essentially a sequence of magnets) on 5,000 qubits.

According to a study by scientists from D-Wave and Boston University, published in the journal Nature, the team has validated that quantum annealing a mathematical process used to find low-energy states by using quantum fluctuations can improve solution quality faster than classical algorithms, at least theoretically. It may be a key step forward in showing the ways in which a quantum processor can compute coherent quantum dynamics in large-scale optimization problems.

D-Wave customers who subscribe to the Leap quantum cloud service can access the new commercial-grade, annealing-based quantum computer as of April 19.

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The main takeaway for enterprises is that spin-glass computing on a quantum annealing device may eventually be able to efficiently solve optimization problems, achieving a goal with as little energy as possible. For example, it could be a relatively efficient way to answer questions such as Should I ship this package on this truck or the next one? or the traveling salesman problem (What is the most efficient route a traveling salesperson should take to visit different cities?), as D-Wave wrote.

D-Wave is one of the only companies that offers enterprise quantum computing space with both gate and annealing programs, which now includes its 5,000 qubit, commercial-grade Advantage quantum computer. There is still some question as to how practical this technology is, but the new paper is proof that further commercial quantum computing optimization can be performed on D-Waves hardware.

SEE: Should IT teams factor quantum computing into their decisions?

Getting deeper into the physics, spin glasses are often used as test beds for paradigmatic computing, the researchers said, but using this approach in a programmable system and therefore one that can be used to do practical calculations still leads to potential problems. D-Wave has solved this on its hardware by using quantum-critical spin-glass dynamics on thousands of qubits with a superconducting quantum annealer.

The same hardware that has already provided useful experimental proving ground for quantum critical dynamics can be also employed to seek low-energy states that assist in finding solutions to optimization problems, said Wojciech Zurek, theoretical physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and leading authority on quantum theory, in D-Waves press release.

Applications that solve optimization problems like the packaging shipping question above require a minimum energy state from the quantum annealing processors they run on. Other calculations that could be used for decision-making, such as probabilistic sampling problems, need good low-energy samples in order to run.

D-Wave says spin glasses can be brought into low-energy states faster by annealing quantum fluctuations than by conventional thermal annealing.

This paper gives evidence that the quantum dynamics of a dedicated hardware platform are faster than for known classical algorithms to find the preferred, lowest energy state of a spin glass, and so promises to continue to fuel the further development of quantum annealers for dealing with practical problems, said Gabriel Aeppli, professor of physics at ETH Zrich and EPF Lausanne, and head of the Photon Science Division of the Paul Scherrer Institut.

Another problem researchers in the quantum computing world are trying to solve is qubit coherence. In a simplified sense, coherence means that a quantum state maintains certain physical qualities while in use. Research shows that coherent quantum annealing can improve solution quality faster than classical algorithms.

Hand-in-hand development of the gate and annealing programs will bring us to longer coherence times and better qubit parameters, allowing our advantage over classical optimization to grow, Andrew King, director of performance research for D-Wave, wrote in a blog post.

While the newly published research was conducted on the currently commercially available Advantage quantum computer, D-Wave is also working on its next iteration. The Advantage2 system is in the experimental prototype stage and will be D-Waves sixth-generation quantum computing hardware. D-Wave anticipates the full Advantage2 system will launch with 7,000 qubits and does not have a projected release date for the alpha version.

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Riverlane founder and CEO, Steve Brierley | Image credit: Riverlane

Cambridge-based Riverlane, a quantum engineering company, announced that it has raised 15M (approximately 16.98M) in a Series B round of funding. The startup says that the funds will boost the companys valuation as well as carry it to a cash flow break-even.

According to Boston Consulting Group, the quantum computing sector is expected to generate up to $850B in economic value over the next 15-30 years.

To bring transformative new applications in fields such as medication creation, material science, aerospace, and climate change, quantum computers will need to be able to conduct trillions of high-speed operations consistently and without interruption.

According to Riverlane, current quantum computers can only carry out a few hundred quantum operations before failing. This is because the nature of all sorts of qubits results in a high error rate.

In order to be functional, quantum computers must be able to identify, diagnose, and fix quantum faults as they arise, allowing them to grow from a few hundred error-free quantum operations (QuOps) today to a trillion (TeraQuOps).

This is the number of operations needed to run the majority of known quantum algorithms. And this is where Riverlane steps in.

The company is developing qubit Control and error Decoding hardware and software to handle the TeraQuOp problem. The words control and decode are essential components of Riverlanes quantum operating system, Deltaflow.OS.

Riverlane revealed the worlds fastest Decode solution in November 2022, allowing Deltaflow.OS to accommodate more qubits than was previously possible.

By 2025-end, the company says its Decode solution will be developed into a chip-based TeraQuOp decoder capable of processing up to 100TB of data per second the equivalent of processing as much data as Netflix streams globally.

To solve this problem, we must design and engineer the dedicated chips that every quantum computer will need, says the company.

Riverlane founder and CEO, Steve Brierley, says, Solving quantum error correction one of the defining scientific challenges of our times will enable quantum computers to accurately simulate the true complexity of nature.

Armed with useful quantum computers, humans will enter the Quantum Age, where we go from slow trial and error to solve complex problems to an era of rapid design using quantum computers. We havent even begun to imagine the many ways such technology will positively transform our world, adds Brierley.

In order to meet these challenges, Riverlane is working with a third of the worlds quantum hardware companies. These include Infleqtion (formerly Cold Quanta), Qolab, Quera, Seec, Rigetti, and Universal Quantum.

Additionally, the company is also working with some of the top academic research institutions in the world, including the University of Wisconsin, Duke University, University of Oxford, and University of Innsbruck.

Riverlane also collaborates with industry leaders including AstraZeneca, Merck, Astex, Rolls Royce, and Johnson Matthey to better understand the applications employing error-corrected quantum computers.

Riverlane aims to make quantum computing much more quickly than was previously thought possible To fully unlock the massive potential of quantum computing, we need a huge increase in the size and reliability of quantum computers.

The company is developing Deltaflow.OS, an operating system for quantum computers that converts a large number of unstable physical qubits into error-free logical qubits, allowing users to develop dependable applications.

Currently, the company has 100 engineers and scientists working from offices in Cambridge, UK, Boston, and San Francisco.

The round was led by Molten Ventures along with participation from simulation, high-performance computing (HPC), and artificial intelligence leader Altair.

Existing investors Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), Amadeus Capital Partners and the National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF) also invested in this round.

As per the deal, Altairs CEO and founder, James R. Scapa, will sit on the Riverlane board.

Scapa says, Riverlanes ground-breaking technology provides a critical common software platform including error correction across all quantum hardware architectures to accelerate the impact and scale of quantum computing.

Error correction is the main technological issue for quantum computing to attain the scale and dependability required to actualize its transformational potential.

Altair has a long history of creating and investing in HPC technologies. Collaborating with Riverlane allows Altair to stay ahead of the curve of transformative technologies to help our customers fast-track their innovation, adds Scapa.

Riverlane says it will use the funds to accelerate the development of its operating system for error-corrected quantum computing, Deltaflow.OS.

The UK-based startup is already working on Deltaflow with several of the worlds premier quantum hardware firms, academic laboratories, and government organisations.OS with a variety of qubit kinds.

Amelia Armour, partner at Amadeus Capital Partners, says, We are proud to carry on our support for Riverlane, helping the company continue its vision, to design and engineer the complex chips that every quantum computer will need to control the qubits and simultaneously decode the errors that quantum computers produce.

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UK-based Riverlane raises 16.9M to make quantum computing ... - Silicon Canals