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Crunch numbers fast and at scale has been at the centre of computing technology. In the past few decades, a new type of computing has garnered significant interest. Quantum computers have been in development since the 1980s. They use properties of quantum physics to solve complex problems that cant be solved by classical computers.

Companies like IBM and Google have been continuously building and refining their quantum hardware. Simultaneously, several researchers have also been exploring new areas where quantum computers can deliver exponential change.

In the context of advances in quantum technologies, The Hindu caught with IBM Researchs Director Gargi Dasgupta.

Dasgupta noted that quantum computers complement traditional computing machines, and said the notion that quantum computers will take over classical computers is not true.

Quantum computers are not supreme against classical computers because of a laboratory experiment designed to essentially [and almost certainly exclusively] implement one very specific quantum sampling procedure with no practical applications, Dasgupta said.

Also Read: Keeping secrets in a quantum world and going beyond

For quantum computers to be widely used, and more importantly, have a positive impact, it is imperative to build programmable quantum computing systems that can implement a wide range of algorithms and programmes.

Having practical applications will alone help researchers use both quantum and classical systems in concert for discovery in science and to create commercial value in business.

To maximise the potential of quantum computers, the industry must solve challenges from the cryogenics, production and effects materials at very low temperatures. This is one of the reasons why IBM built its super-fridge to house Condor, Dasgupta explained.

Quantum processors require special conditions to operate, and they must be kept at near-absolute zero, like IBMs quantum chips are kept at 15mK. The deep complexity and the need for specialised cryogenics is why at least IBMs quantum computers are accessible via the cloud, and will be for the foreseeable future, Dasgupta, who is also IBMs CTO for South Asia region, noted.

Quantum computing in India

Dasgupta said that interest in quantum computing has spiked in India as IBM saw an many exceptional participants from the country at its global and virtual events. The list included academicians and professors, who all displayed great interest in quantum computing.

In a blog published last year, IBM researchers noted that India gave quantum technology 80 billion rupees as part of its National Mission on Quantum technologies and Applications. They believe its a great time to be doing quantum physics since the government and people are serious as well as excited about it.

Also Read: IBM plans to build a 1121 qubit system. What does this technology mean?

Quantum computing is expanding to multiple industries such as banking, capital markets, insurance, automotive, aerospace, and energy.

In years to come, the breadth and depth of the industries leveraging quantum will continue to grow, Dasgupta noted.

Industries that depend on advances in materials science will start to investigate quantum computing. For instance, Mitsubishi and ExxonMobil are using quantum technology to develop more accurate chemistry simulation techniques in energy technologies.

Additionally, Dasgupta said carmaker Daimler is working with IBM scientists to explore how quantum computing can be used to advance the next generation of EV batteries.

Exponential problems, like those found in molecular simulation in chemistry, and optimisation in finance, as well as machine learning continue to remain intractable for classical computers.

Quantum-safe cryptography

As researchers make advancement into quantum computers, some cryptocurrency enthusiasts fear that quantum computers can break security encryption. To mitigate risks associated with cryptography services, Quantum-safe cryptography was introduced.

For instance, IBM offers Quantum Risk Assessment, which it claims as the worlds first quantum computing safe enterprise class tape. It also uses Lattice-based cryptography to hide data inside complex algebraic structures called lattices. Difficult math problems are useful for cryptographers as they can use the intractability to protect information, surpassing quantum computers cracking techniques.

According to Dasgupta, even the National Institute of Standards and Technologys (NIST) latest list for quantum-safe cryptography standards include several candidates based on lattice cryptography.

Also Read: Google to use quantum computing to develop new medicines

Besides, Lattice-based cryptography is the core for another encryption technology called Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). This could make it possible to perform calculations on data without ever seeing sensitive data or exposing it to hackers.

Enterprises from banks to insurers can safely outsource the task of running predictions to an untrusted environment without the risk of leaking sensitive data, Dasgupta said.

Last year, IBM said it will unveil 1121-qubit quantum computer by 2023. Qubit is the basic unit of a quantum computer. Prior to the launch, IBM will release the 433-qubit Osprey processor. It will also debut 121-qubit Eagle chip to reduce qubits errors and scale the number of qubits needed to reach Quantum Advantage.

The 1,121-qubit Condor chip, is the inflection point for lower-noise qubits. By 2023, its physically smaller qubits, with on-chip isolators and signal amplifiers and multiple nodes, will have scaled to deliver the capability of Quantum Advantage, Dasgupta said.

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IBMs top executive says, quantum computers will never reign supreme over classical ones - The Hindu

Illustration: Benjamin Currie/Gizmodo

In the 1950s, when physicists were racing to invent the first laser, they found that the rules of quantum mechanics restricted how pure the color of their light could be. Since then, physicists and engineers have always built lasers with those restrictions in mind. But new theoretical research from two independent groups of physicists indicates that nature is more lax than previously thought. The findings could lead to improved, more monochromatic lasers for applications such as quantum computing, which the researchers illustrate in two proposed laser designs.

The work overthrows 60 years of understanding about what limits lasers, said physicist Howard Wiseman of Griffith University in Australia, whose group published their work in Nature Physics last October.

A laser, in essence, is a megaphone for light. The word itself, originally an acronym, reflects this function: light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Send in a photon of the right frequency, and the laser makes copies of it, multiplying the original signal.

These photon clones exit the laser in sync with each other, traveling in phase, as the experts call it. You can think of it this way: Each photon is a wave, with its crest and trough lined up with its neighbor, marching together in lock-step out of the laser. This contrasts with most other light sources, such as your reading lamp or even the Sun, which both emit photons that disperse randomly.

The longer photons stay in sync, the more monochromatic the light. The color of a light source corresponds to the wavelength of its photons, with green light spanning roughly the 500 to 550 nanometer range, for example. For multiple photons to stay in sync a long time, their wavelengths must line up very preciselymeaning the photons need to be as close to one color as possible.

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This synchrony of laser photons, known as temporal coherence, is one of the devices most useful properties. Many technologies make use of laser lights ridiculously fast and steady rhythm, its wave pattern repeatingat hundreds of trillions of times a second for visible lasers. For example, this property underpins the worlds most precise timekeeping devices, known as optical lattice clocks.

But photons gradually lose sync after they leave the laser; how long they stick together is known as the lasers coherence time. In 1958, physicists Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes estimated the coherence time of a perfect laser. (This is a common physicist design strategy: Consider the most ideal version of something before building a far more lacking real-world device.) They found an equation thought to represent an ultimate coherence time limit for lasers, set by the laws of physics. Physicists refer to this as the Schawlow-Townes limit.

The two new papers find that the Schawlow-Townes limit is not the ultimate limit. In principle, it should be possible to build lasers which are significantly more coherent, said physicist David Pekker of the University of Pittsburgh, who led the other group. Their paper, currently under peer review, is posted as a pre-print on arXiv.

Both groups argue that the Schawlow-Townes limit rests on assumptions about the laser that are no longer true. Schawlow and Townes basically thought of the laser as a hollow box, in which photons multiply and leave at a rate proportional to the amount of light inside the box. Put another way, the photons flow out of Schawlow and Towness laser like water drains from a hole in a barrel. Water flows faster when the barrel is fuller, and vice versa.

But Wiseman and Pekker both found that if you place a valve on the laser to control the rate of the photon flow, you can actually make a laser coherent for much longer than the Schawlow-Townes limit. Wisemans paper takes this a step further. Allowing for these photon-controlling valves, his team re-estimates the coherence time limit for the perfect laser. We show that ours is the ultimate quantum limit, said Wiseman, meaning the true physical limit dictated by quantum mechanics.

Schawlow and Towness estimate, while not the fundamental restriction on lasers physicists originally thought, was reasonable for its time, said Wiseman. No one had any means for precisely controlling the flow of light out of a laser in the way that Wiseman and Pekker propose. But todays lasers are a different story. Physicists can now control light with a multitude of devices developed for the budding quantum computing industry.

Pekker has teamed up with physicist Michael Hatridge, also of the University of Pittsburgh, to bring the new laser design to life. Hatridges expertise involves building circuits out of superconducting wire for storing and controlling microwave-frequency photons. They plan to build a microwave-emitting laserknown as a maserfor programming qubits inside a quantum computer made of superconducting circuits. Though building this new maser will take years of work and troubleshooting, Hatridge said they have all the tools and knowledge to make it possible. Thats why were excited about it, because its just another engineering project, Hatridge said.

Wiseman is looking for collaborators to build his design, also a maser. I would really, really like this to happen, but I recognize its a long-term goal, he said.

The designs are completely feasible, said physicist Steven Touzard of the National University of Singapore, who was not involved in either of the new papers. However, Pekker and Wisemans work may not directly lead to useful commercial lasers, according to Touzard. He pointed out that builders of lasers do not commonly use the Schawlow-Townes limit to direct their designs. So overturning the limit could be more of a theoretical advancement than an engineering one, he said.

Curiously, the two new designs also contradict another conventional wisdom about lasers. The devices do not produce light via so-called stimulated emission, which makes up the s and e in the acronym laser. Stimulated emission is a type of interaction between light and matter, in which a photon impinges upon an atom and stimulates the atom to emit an identical photon. If we imagine a laser as a box of light, as before, a laser that amplifies light using stimulated emission multiplies the signal proportionally to the amount of light already in the box. Another type of laser invented in 2012, known as a superradiant laser, also does not use stimulated emission to amplify light, according to Touzard.

The idea of a laser has outgrown its name. It is no longer exclusively light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

Of course, many such examples exist in the English language. The change in meaning is known as semantic shift and is common wherever new technology is involved, according to linguist Micha Elsner of the Ohio State University. Ships still sail across the ocean, even when no actual sails are involved, Elsner said in an email. You can still dial someones number even though your phone doesnt have a dial.

Even though a words etymologyits origincertainly gives it a starting point, it does not determine its destiny forever going forward, linguist Brian Joseph of the Ohio State University said in an email.

As Cold War goals transitioned into 21st century ones, lasers have evolved, too. Theyve been around long enough to integrate into nearly all aspects of modern life: They can correct human vision, read our grocery barcodes, etch computer chips, transmit video files from the Moon, help steer self-driving cars, and set the mood at psychedelic ragers. And now, the laser could be reinvented again. A 60-year-old device remains a symbol of a sci-fi future.

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Physicists Are Reinventing the Laser - Gizmodo

What lies beyond all we can see? The question may seem unanswerable. Nevertheless, some cosmologists have a response: Our universe is a swelling bubble. Outside it, more bubble universes exist, all immersed in an eternally expanding and energized seathe multiverse.

The idea is polarizing. Some physicists embrace the multiverse to explain why our bubble looks so special (only certain bubbles can host life), while others reject the theory for making no testable predictions (since it predicts all conceivable universes). But some researchers expect that they just havent been clever enough to work out the precise consequences of the theory yet.

Now, various teams are developing new ways to infer exactly how the multiverse bubbles and what happens when those bubble universes collide.

Its a long shot, said Jonathan Braden, a cosmologist at the University of Toronto who is involved in the effort, but, he said, its a search for evidence for something you thought you could never test.

The multiverse hypothesis sprang from efforts to understand our own universes birth. In the large-scale structure of the universe, theorists see signs of an explosive growth spurt during the cosmoss infancy. In the early 1980s, as physicists investigated how space might have startedand stoppedinflating, an unsettling picture emerged. The researchers realized that while space may have stopped inflating here (in our bubble universe) and there (in other bubbles), quantum effects should continue to inflate most of space, an idea known as eternal inflation.

The difference between bubble universes and their surroundings comes down to the energy of space itself. When space is as empty as possible and cant possibly lose more energy, it exists in what physicists call a true vacuum state. Think of a ball lying on the floorit cant fall any further. But systems can also have false vacuum states. Imagine a ball in a bowl on a table. The ball can roll around a bit while more or less staying put. But a large enough jolt will land it on the floorin the true vacuum.

In the cosmological context, space can get similarly stuck in a false vacuum state. A speck of false vacuum will occasionally relax into true vacuum (likely through a random quantum event), and this true vacuum will balloon outward as a swelling bubble, feasting on the false vacuums excess energy, in a process called false vacuum decay. Its this process that may have started our cosmos with a bang. A vacuum bubble could have been the first event in the history of our universe, said Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist at University College London.

But physicists struggle mightily to predict how vacuum bubbles behave. A bubbles future depends on countless minute details that add up. Bubbles also change rapidlytheir walls approach the speed of light as they fly outwardand feature quantum mechanical randomness and waviness. Different assumptions about these processes give conflicting predictions, with no way to tell which ones might resemble reality. Its as though youve taken a lot of things that are just very hard for physicists to deal with and mushed them all together and said, Go ahead and figure out whats going on, Braden said.

Since they cant prod actual vacuum bubbles in the multiverse, physicists have sought digital and physical analogs of them.

One group recently coaxed vacuum bubble-like behavior out of a simple simulation. The researchers, including John Preskill, a prominent theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, started with the [most] baby version of this problem that you can think of, as co-author Ashley Milsted put it: a line of about 1,000 digital arrows that could point up or down. The place where a string of mainly up arrows met a string of largely down arrows marked a bubble wall, and by flipping arrows, the researchers could make bubble walls move and collide. In certain circumstances, this model perfectly mimics the behavior of more complicated systems in nature. The researchers hoped to use it to simulate false vacuum decay and bubble collisions.

At first the simple setup didnt act realistically. When bubble walls crashed together, they rebounded perfectly, with none of the expected intricate reverberations or outflows of particles (in the form of flipped arrows rippling down the line). But after adding some mathematical flourishes, the team saw colliding walls that spewed out energetic particleswith more particles appearing as the collisions grew more violent.

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How Universes Might Bubble Up and Collide - WIRED

The Internet of Things (IoT) is actively shaping both the industrial and consumer worlds, and by 2023, consumers, companies, and governments will install 40 billion IoT devices globally.

Smart tech finds its way to every business and consumer domain there isfrom retail to healthcare, from finances to logisticsand a missed opportunity strategically employed by a competitor can easily qualify as a long-term failure for companies who dont innovate.

Moreover, the 2020s challenges just confirmed the need to secure all four components of the IoT Model: Sensors, Networks (Communications), Analytics (Cloud), and Applications.

One of the top candidates to help in securing IoT is Quantum Computing, while the idea of convergence of IoT and Quantum Computing is not a new topic, it was discussed in many works of literature and covered by various researchers, but nothing is close to practical applications so far. Quantum Computing is not ready yet, it is years away from deployment on a commercial scale.

To understand the complexity of this kind of convergence, first, you need to recognize the security issues of IoT, second, comprehend the complicated nature of Quantum Computing.

IoT systems diverse security issues include:

Classical computing relies, at its ultimate level, on principles expressed by a branch of math called Boolean algebra. Data must be processed in an exclusive binary state at any point in time or bits. While the time that each transistor or capacitor need be either in 0 or 1 before switching states is now measurable in billionths of a second, there is still a limit as to how quickly these devices can be made to switch state. As we progress to smaller and faster circuits, we begin to reach the physical limits of materials and the threshold for classical laws of physics to apply. Beyond this, the quantum world takes over.

In a quantum computer, several elemental particles such as electrons or photons can be used with either their charge or polarization acting as a representation of 0 and/or 1. Each of these particles is known as a quantum bit, or qubit, the nature and behavior of these particles form the basis of quantum computing.

The two most relevant aspects of quantum physics are the principles of superposition and entanglement.

Taken together, quantum superposition and entanglement create an enormously enhanced computing power. Where a 2-bit register in an ordinary computer can store only one of four binary configurations (00, 01, 10, or 11) at any given time, a 2-qubit register in a quantum computer can store all four numbers simultaneously, because each qubit represents two values. If more qubits are added, the increased capacity is expanded exponentially.

One of the most exciting avenues that researchers, armed with qubits, are exploring, is communications security.

Quantum security leads us to the concept ofquantum cryptographywhich uses physics to develop a cryptosystem completely secure against being compromised without the knowledge of the sender or the receiver of the messages.

Essentially, quantum cryptography is based on the usage of individual particles/waves of light (photon) and their intrinsic quantum properties to develop an unbreakable cryptosystem (because it is impossible to measure the quantum state of any system without disturbing that system).

Quantum cryptography uses photons to transmit a key. Once the key is transmitted, coding, and encoding using the normal secret-key method can take place. But how does a photon become a key? How do you attach information to a photon's spin?

This is where binary code comes into play. Each type of a photon's spin represents one piece of information -- usually a 1 or a 0, for binary code. This code uses strings of 1s and 0s to create a coherent message. For example, 11100100110 could correspond with h-e-l-l-o. So a binary code can be assigned to each photon -- for example, a photon that has a vertical spin ( | ) can be assigned a 1.

Regular, non-quantum encryption can work in a variety of ways but, generally, a message is scrambled and can only be unscrambled using a secret key. The trick is to make sure that whomever youre trying to hide your communication from doesnt get their hands on your secret key. But such encryption techniques have their vulnerabilities. Certain products called weak keys happen to be easier to factor than others. Also, Moores Law continually ups the processing power of our computers. Even more importantly, mathematicians are constantly developing new algorithms that allow for easier factorization of the secret key.

Quantum cryptography avoids all these issues. Here, the key is encrypted into a series of photons that get passed between two parties trying to share secret information. Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle dictates that an adversary cant look at these photons without changing or destroying them.

With its capabilities, quantum computing can help address the challenges and issues that hamper the growth of IoT. Some of these capabilities are:

Quantum computing is still in its development stage with tech giants such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft putting in resources to build powerful quantum computers. While they were able to build machines containing more and more qubits, for example, Google announced in 2019 they achieved Quantum Supremacy, the challenge is to get these qubits to operate smoothly and with less error. But with the technology being very promising, continuous research and development are expected until such time that it reaches widespread practical applications for both consumers and businesses.

IoT is expanding as we depend on our digital devices more every day. Furthermore, WFH (Work From Home) concept resulted from COVID-19 lockdowns accelerated the deployment of many IoT devices and shorten the learning curves of using such devices. When IoT converges with Quantum Computing under Quantum IoT or QIoT, that will push other technologies to use Quantum Computing and add Quantum or Q to their products and services labels, we will see more adoption of Quantum hardware and software applications in addition to Quantum services like QSaaS, QIaaS, and QPaaS as parts of Quantum Cloud and QAI (Quantum Artificial Intelligence) to mention few examples.

A version of this article first appeared onIEEE-IoT.

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The Convergence of Internet of Things and Quantum Computing - BBN Times