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In the race to commercialize a new type of powerful computer, Microsoft Corp. has just pulled up to the starting line with a slick-looking set of wheels. Theres just one problem: it doesn't have an engine at least not yet.

The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant is competing with Alphabet Inc.s Google, International Business Machines Corp. and a clutch of small, specialized companies to develop quantum computers machines that, in theory, will be many times more powerful than existing computers by bending the laws of physics.

Microsoft says it has a different approach that will make its technology less error-prone and more suitable for commercial use. If it works. On Monday, the company unveiled a new programming language called Q# pronounced Q Sharp and tools that help coders craft software for quantum computers. Microsoft is also releasing simulators that will let programmers test that software on a traditional desktop computer or through its Azure cloud-computing service.

The machines are one of the advanced technologies, along with artificial intelligence and augmented reality, that Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella considers crucial to the future of his company. Microsoft, like IBM and Google, will most likely rent computing time on these quantum machines through the internet as a service.

D-Wave Systems Inc. in 2011 became the first company to sell a quantum computer, although its technology has been controversial and can only perform a certain subset of mathematical problems. Google and IBM have produced machines that are thought to be close to achieving quantum supremacy the ability to tackle a problem too complex to solve on any standard supercomputer. IBM and startup Rigetti Computing also have software for their machines.

Microsoft, in contrast, is still trying to build a working machine. It is pursuing a novel design based on controlling an elusive particle called a Majorana fermion that no one was sure even existed a few years ago. Engineers are close to being able to control the Majorana fermionin a way that will enable them to perform calculations, Todd Holmdahl, head of Microsofts quantum computing efforts, said in an interview. Holmdahl, who led development of the Xbox and the company's HoloLens goggles, said Microsoft will have a quantum computer on the market within five years.

We are talking to multiple customers today and we are proposing quantum-inspired services for certain problems, he added.

These systems push the boundaries of how atoms and other tiny particles work. While traditional computers process bits of information as 1s or zeros, quantum machines rely on "qubits" that can be a 1 and a zero at the same time. So two qubits can represent four numbers simultaneously, and three qubits can represent eight numbers, and so on. This means quantum computers can perform calculations much faster than standard machines and tackle problems that are way more complex.

Krysta Svore

Source: Microsoft

Applications could include things like creating new drugs and new materials or solving complex chemistry problems. The killer app of quantum computing is discovering a more efficient way to synthesize ammonia for fertilizer a process that currently consumes three percent of the worlds natural gas, according to Krysta Svore, who oversees the software aspects of Microsofts quantum work.

The technology is still emerging from a long research phase, and its capabilities are hotly debated. Researchers have only been able to keep qubits in a quantum state for fractions of a second. When qubits fall out of a quantum state they produce errors in their calculations, which can negate any benefit of using a quantum computer.

Microsoft says it uses a different design called a topological quantum computer that in theory will create more stable qubits. This couldproduce a machine with an error rate from 1,000 to10,000 times better than computers other companies are building, Holmdahl said.

Reducing or correcting the errors in quantum calculations is essential for the technology to fulfill its commercial potential, said Jonathan Breeze, a research fellow working on advanced materials at Imperial College London.

The lower error rate of Microsoft's design may mean it can be more useful for tackling real applications -- even with a smaller number of qubits perhaps less than 100. Svore said her team has already proven mathematically that algorithms that use a quantum approach can speed up machine learning applications substantially enabling them to run as much as 4,000 times faster. (Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence behind recent advances in computers ability to identify objects in images, translate languages and drive cars).

"We want to solve today's unsolvable problems and we have an opportunity with a unique, differentiated technology to do that," Holmdahl said.

Read more from the original source:
Microsoft Takes Path Less Traveled to Build a Quantum ...

Programming a computer is generally a fairly arduous process, involving hours of coding, not to mention the laborious work of debugging, testing, and documenting to make sure it works properly.

But for a team of physicists from the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms and the California Institute of Technology, things are actually much tougher.

Working in a Harvard Physics Department lab, a team of researchers led by Harvard Professors Mikhail Lukin and Markus Greiner and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Vladan Vuletic developed a special type of quantum computer, known as a quantum simulator, that is programmed by capturing super-cooled rubidium atoms with lasers and arranging them in a specific order, then allowing quantum mechanics to do the necessary calculations.

The system could be used to shed light on a host of complex quantum processes, including the connection between quantum mechanics and material properties, and it could investigate new phases of matter and solve complex real-world optimization problems. The system is described in a Nov. 30 paper published in the journal Nature.

The combination of the systems large size and high degree of quantum coherence make it an important achievement, researchers say. With more than 50 coherent qubits, this is one of the largest quantum systems ever created with individual assembly and measurement.

In the same issue of Nature, a team from the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland described a similarly sized system of cold charged ions, also controlled with lasers. Taken together, these complimentary advances constitute a major step toward large-scale quantum machines.

Everything happens in a small vacuum chamber where we have a very dilute vapor of atoms which are cooled close to absolute zero, Lukin said. When we focus about 100 laser beams through this cloud, each of them acts like a trap. The beams are so tightly focused, they can either grab one atom or zero; they cant grab two. And thats when the fun starts.

Using a microscope, researchers can take images of the captured atoms in real time, and then arrange them in arbitrary patterns for input.

We assemble them in a way thats very controlled, said Ahmed Omran, a postdoctoral fellow in Lukins lab and a co-author of the paper. Starting with a random pattern, we decide which trap needs to go where to arrange them into desired clusters.

As researchers begin feeding energy into the system, the atoms begin to interact with each other. Those interactions, Lukin said, give the system its quantum nature.

We make the atoms interact, and thats really whats performing the computation, Omran said. In essence, as we excite the system with laser light, it self-organizes. Its not that we say this atom has to be a one or a zero we could do that easily just by throwing light on the atoms but what we do is allow the atoms to perform the computation for us, and then we measure the results.

Those results, Lukin and colleagues said, could shed light on complex quantum mechanical phenomena that are all but impossible to model using conventional computers.

If you have an abstract model where a certain number of particles are interacting with each other in a certain way, the question is why dont we just sit down at a computer and simulate it that way? asked Ph.D. student Alexander Keesling, another co-author. The reason is because these interactions are quantum mechanical in nature. If you try to simulate these systems on a computer, youre restricted to very small system sizes, and the number of parameters are limited.

If you make systems larger and larger, very quickly you will run out of memory and computing power to simulate it on a classical computer, he added. The way around that is to actually build the problem with particles that follow the same rules as the system youre simulating. Thats why we call this a quantum simulator.

Though its possible to use classical computers to model small quantum systems, the simulator developed by Lukin and colleagues uses 51 qubits, making it virtually impossible to replicate using conventional computing techniques.

It is important that we can start by simulating small systems using our machine, he said. So we are able to show those results are correct until we get to the larger systems, because there is no simple comparison we can make.

By Peter Reuell, Harvard Staff Writer | July 3, 2012 | Editor's Pick

When we start off, all the atoms are in a classical state. And when we read out at the end, we obtain a string of classical bits, zeros, and ones, said Hannes Bernien, another postdoctoral fellow in Lukins lab, and also a co-author. But in order to get from the start to the end, they have to go through the complex quantum mechanical state. If you have a substantial error rate, the quantum mechanical state will collapse.

Its that coherent quantum state, Bernien said, that allows the system to work as a simulator, and also makes the machine a potentially valuable tool for gaining insight into complex quantum phenomena and eventually performing useful calculations. The system already allows researchers to obtain unique insights into transformations between different types of quantum phases, called quantum phase transitions. It may also help shed light on new and exotic forms of matter, Lukin said.

Normally, when you talk about phases of matter, you talk about matter being in equilibrium, he said. But some very interesting new states of matter may occur far away from equilibrium and there are many possibilities for that in the quantum domain. This is a completely new frontier.

Already, Lukin said, the researchers have seen evidence of such states. In one of the first experiments conducted with the new system, the team discovered a coherent non-equilibrium state that remained stable for a surprisingly long time.

Quantum computers will be used to realize and study such non-equilibrium states of matter in the coming years, he said. Another intriguing direction involves solving complex optimization problems. It turns out one can encode some very complicated problems by programming atom locations and interactions between them. In such systems, some proposed quantum algorithms could potentially outperform classical machines. Its not yet clear whether they will or not, because we just cant test them classically. But we are on the verge of entering the regime where we can test them on the fully quantum machines containing over 100 controlled qubits. Scientifically, this is really exciting.

Other co-authors of the study were visiting scientist Sylvain Schwartz, Harvard graduate students Harry Levine and Soonwon Choi, research associate Alexander S. Zibrov, and Professor Manuel Endres.

This research was supported with funding from the National Science Foundation, the Center for Ultracold Atoms, the Army Research Office, and the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship.

By Arthur Goldhammer, Center for European Studies | November 30, 2017

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Researchers create new type of quantum computer | Harvard Gazette