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Due to the changes needed to algorithms and computational thinking, Telstra chief scientist Hugh Bradlow believes the first commercial users of quantum computers will need some help adjusting -- and the Australian incumbent telco will be there to offer that help at a price.

"I can assure you they are not going to walk in on day one and know how to use these things," Bradlow said on Wednesday evening.

"We want to be able to offer it as-a-service to them ... they will need a lot of hand holding, and they are not going to run the equipment themselves, it's complicated."

Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) are two of the companies backing the work of a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) that is looking to develop quantum computing in silicon.

At the end of 2015, both companies contributed AU$10 million over five years to UNSW.

Despite racing against far greater funded rivals, head of UNSW's quantum effort professor Michelle Simmons said she is happy with the funding the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology has received.

"At the moment, you have to prove you have the best hardware of anything out there to know whether you are going to go further or not," Simmons said. "I guess one of the things we've been very much driven by is milestone-based research.

"Can we actually develop the qubits, qubit by qubit, and prove that they are better than other qubits that out there? And so if you have lots of money in the beginning, and you are not doing that systematic thorough approach, it's actually not that helpful to you. You have to do it, proving it along the way."

Simmons said her team is currently looking at producing a 10-qubit system by the end of the decade, and, if successful, will be looking to move up to 100 qubits.

In October last year, the UNSW team announced that they had created a new qubit that remains in a stable superposition for 10 times longer than previously achieved.

A year earlier, the team built the first 2-qubit logic gate in silicon.

"The prototype chip we want to make within five years is a pretty shrinkable manufacturing process, and it will be able to perform a variety of calculations; we hope it will be able to potentially solve the problem that currently can't be solved on an existing computer," Andrew Dzurak, scientia professor at the university, said at the time.

"That particular type of problem may not be the sort of problem that is going to excite many commercial people in the first instance, but it will be an important principal."

Even though UNSW is at the frontier of quantum computing, however, Bradlow said Telstra just wants to get its hands on one.

"We are agnostic at the end of the day; we just want a quantum computer," he said. "We do hope Michelle's team wins ... we've gone and put our money on it because we think it's got the best odds, so it's not just a random bet, but we are obviously keeping across anything that is out there.

"Over the last year and a half, I've probably visited every major group in the world, and they all have very different views and by seeing multiple views you get a much better perspective.

"So it's important to keep across everything."

For its part, CBA is preparing for a quantum future by using a quantum computing simulator from QxBranch.

"The difference between the emulator of a quantum computer and the real hardware is that we run the simulator on classical computers, so we don't get the benefit of the speed up that you get from quantum, but we can simulate its behaviour and some of the broad characteristics of what the eventual hardware will do," QxBranch CEO Michael Brett told ZDNet in April.

"What we provide is the ability for people to explore and validate the applications of quantum computing so that as soon as the hardware is ready, they'll be able to apply those applications and get the benefit immediately of the unique advantages of quantum computing."

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Telstra just wants a quantum computer to offer as-a-service - ZDNet

Topological qubits are among the more baffling, and if practical, more promising ways to approach scalable quantum computing. At least thats what Microsoft, Purdue University, and three other universities are hoping after having recently signed a five-year agreement to develop a topological qubit based quantum computer.

Qubits are strange no matter what form they take. The basic idea being that through superposition, a qubit can be in two states at once (0 and 1) and hence a quantum computers capacity scales exponentially with the number of qubits versus classical computers which scale linearly with the number of bits. Most quantum computing efforts rely on producing superposition in some material IBM uses superconducting devices and there have been many qubit schemes proposed.

Topological qubits are among the more mysterious. They rely on quasi particles called non-abelian anyons which have not definitively been proven to exist. Using these topological qubits, information is encoded by braiding the paths of these quasi-particles. The benefit, say researchers, is topological qubits resist decoherence much better than other qubit types and should require far less error correction. At least thats the theory.

Microsoft has been dabbling in topological qubit theory for several years. Last fall Microsoft quantum researcher Alex Boharov was interviewed by Nature (Inside Microsofts quest for a topological quantum computer, October 21, 2016) on why pursue such an exotic path.

Our qubits are not even material things. But then again, the elementary particles that physicists run in their colliders are not really solid material objects. Here we have non-abelian anyons, which are even fuzzier than normal particles. They are quasiparticles. The most studied kinds of anyon emerge from chains of very cold electrons that are confined at the edge of a 2D surface. These anyons act like both an electron and its antimatter counterpart at the same time, and appear as dense peaks of conductance at each end of the chain. You can measure them with high-precision devices, but not see them under any microscope said Boharov.

As explained by Boharov, Noise from the environment and other parts of the computer is inevitable, and that might cause the intensity and location of the quasiparticle to fluctuate. But thats OK, because we do not encode information into the quasiparticle itself, but in the order in which we swap positions of the anyons.We call that braiding, because if you draw out a sequence of swaps between neighbouring pairs of anyons in space and time, the lines that they trace look braided. The information is encoded in a topological property that is, a collective property of the system that only changes with macroscopic movements, not small fluctuations.

The upside is tantalizing he said, So far, weve had an amazing ride in terms of creating more-efficient algorithms reducing the number of qubit interactions, known as gates, that you need to run certain computations that are impossible on classical computers. In the early 2000s, for example, people thought it would take about 24 billion years to calculate on a quantum computer the energy levels of ferredoxin, which plants use in photosynthesis. Now, through a combination of theory, practice, engineering and simulation, the most optimistic estimates suggest that it may take around an hour. We are continuing to work on these problems, and gradually switching towards more applied work, looking towards quantum chemistry, quantum genomics and things that might be done on a small-to-medium-sized quantum computer.

Now, Microsoft is further ramping up its quantum efforts with a collaboration that includes Purdue as well as a global experimental group established by Microsoft at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, TU Delft in the Netherlands, and the University of Sydney, Australia.For Purdue, this is an extension of joint work on quantum computing with Microsoft begun roughly one year ago. Michael Freedman of Microsofts Station Q in Santa Barbara leads the effort.

Whats exciting is that were doing the science and engineering hand-in-hand, at the same time, says Purdue researcher Michael Manfra in an article on the project posted on the Purdue web site yesterday.

Purdues role in the project will be to grow and study ultra-pure semiconductors and hybrid systems of semiconductors and superconductors that may form the physical platform upon which a quantum computer is built. Manfras group has expertise in a technique called molecular beam epitaxy, and this technique will be used to build low-dimensional electron systems that form the basis for quantum bits, or qubits, according to the article.

Purdue President Mitch Daniels noted in the article that Purdue was home to the first computer science department in the United States, and said the partnership and Manfras work places the university at the forefront of quantum computing.Someday quantum computing will move from the laboratory to actual daily use, and when it does, it will signal another explosion of computing power like that brought about by the silicon chip, Daniels said.

Link to Purdue article written by Steve Tally: http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2017/Q2/microsoft,-purdue-collaborate-to-advance-quantum-computing-.html

Link Nature interview: https://www.nature.com/news/inside-microsoft-s-quest-for-a-topological-quantum-computer-1.20774

Caption for feature image:Michael Freedman (left), Microsoft Corp. quantum computing researcher, and Suresh Garimella, executive vice president for research and partnerships, and Purdues Goodson Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering, sign a new five-year enhanced collaboration between Purdue and Microsoft to build a robust and scalable quantum computer by producing what scientists call a topological qubit. (Purdue University photo/Charles Jischke)

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Microsoft, Purdue Tackle Topological Quantum Computer - HPCwire - HPCwire (blog)

Still waiting patiently for quantum computing to bring about the next revolution in digital processing power? We might now be a little closer, with a discovery that could help us build quantum computers at mass scale.

Scientists have refined a technique using diamond defects to store information, adding silicon to make the readouts more accurate and suitable for use in the quantum computers of the future.

To understand how the new process works, you need to go back to the basics of the quantum computing vision: small particles kept in a state of superposition, where they can represent both 1, 0, and a combination of the two at the same time.

These quantum bits, or qubits, can process calculations on a much grander scale than the bits in today's computer chips, which are stuck representing either 1 or 0 at any one time.

Getting particles in a state of superposition long enough for us to actually make use of them has proved to be a real challenge for scientists, but one potential solution is through the use of diamond as a base material.

The idea is to use tiny atomic defects inside diamonds to store qubits, and then pass around data at high speeds using light optical circuits rather than electrical circuits.

Diamond-defect qubits rely on a missing carbon atom inside the diamond lattice which is then replaced by an atom of some other element, like nitrogen. The free electrons created by this defect have a magnetic orientation that can be used as a qubit.

So far so good, but our best efforts so far haven't been accurate enough to be useful, because of the broad spectrum of frequencies in the light emitted and that's where the new research comes in.

Scientists added silicon to the qubit creation process, which emits a much narrower band of light, and supplies the precision that quantum computing requires.

At the moment, these silicon qubits don't keep their superposition as well, but the researchers are hopeful this can be overcome by reducing their temperature to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

"The dream scenario in quantum information processing is to make an optical circuit to shuttle photonic qubits and then position a quantum memory wherever you need it," says one of the team, Dirk Englund from MIT. "We're almost there with this. These emitters are almost perfect."

In fact, the researchers produced defects within 50 nanometres of their ideal locations on average, which is about one thousandth the size of a human hair.

Being able to etch defects with this kind of precision means the process of building optical circuits for quantum computers then becomes more straightforward and feasible.

If the team can improve on the promising results so far, diamonds could be the answer to our quantum computing needs: they also naturally emit light in a way that means qubits can be read without having to alter their states.

You still won't be powering up a quantum laptop anytime soon, but we're seeing real progress in the study of the materials and techniques that might one day bring this next-generation processing power to the masses.

The research has been published in Nature Communications.

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Here's How We Can Achieve Mass-Produced Quantum Computers - ScienceAlert

Researchers in Russia say they've developed and tested the world's first blockchain that won't be vulnerable to encryption-breaking attacks from future quantum computers.

If the claims are verified, the technique could be a means of protecting the vast amounts of wealth invested in fast-growing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum which are safe from today's code-breaking methods, but could be exposed by tomorrow's vastly more powerful quantum machines.

A team from the Russian Quantum Centre in Moscow says its quantum blockchain technology has been successfully tested with one of Russia's largest banks, Gazprombank, and could be used as a proof of concept to underpin secure data encryption and storage methods in the future.

To backtrack a little, a blockchain is a publicly accessible, decentralised ledger of recorded information, spread across multiple computers on the internet.

This kind of distributed database is the underlying technology that makes Bitcoin possible where it maintains a list of timestamped digital transactions that can be viewed by anyone on the platform.

The idea is that the blockchain frees users on the network from needing any kind of middleman or central authority to regulate transactions or exchanges of information.

Because all interactions are recorded in the distributed ledger, the blockchain makes everything a matter of public record, which, when it comes to Bitcoin, is what ensures that transactions are legitimate, and that units of the currency aren't duplicated.

The problem with this is that when someone's computer conducts transactions, the system uses digital signatures for authentication purposes but while that protection layer may offer strong enough encryption to secure those exchanges today, they won't be able to withstand quantum computers.

Quantum computers are a technology that's still in development, but once they mature, they're set to offer computational power and speed far in excess of what today's computers can achieve.

While that means quantum computers are poised to do great things for us in tomorrow's world, it's a double-edged sword because that massive increase in performance also means these machines could pose a huge security risk in the world of IT, breaking through comparatively weak encryption walls that currently protect the world of banking, defence, email, social media, you name it.

"If quantum computing takes three decades to truly arrive, there's no reason to panic," as Nicole Kobie reported for Wired last year.

"If it lands in 10 years, our data is in serious trouble. But it's impossible to predict with certainty when it will happen."

Because of this, today's security researchers are busy trying to invent secure systems that can defend us from the unbelievably fast supercomputers of tomorrow a pretty tall order, considering these awesome systems haven't even really been invented yet.

That's what the Russian team's quantum-proof blockchain is another attempt to devise a digital fortress that won't be crushed by quantum computers. And the key, the researchers say, is abandoning part of what currently helps protect blockchain transactions.

"In our quantum-secure blockchain setup, we get rid of digital signatures altogether," one of the researchers, Alexander Lvovsky, told Mary-Ann Russon at IBTimes UK.

"Instead, we utilise quantum cryptography for authentication."

Quantum cryptography depends on entangled particles to work, and the researchers' system used what's called quantum key distribution, which the researchers say makes it possible to make sure nobody's eavesdropping on private communications.

"Parties that communicate via a quantum channel can be completely sure that they are talking to each other, not anybody else. This is the main idea," Lvovsky said.

"Then we had to re-invent the entire blockchain architecture to 'fit' our new authentication technology, thereby making this architecture immune to quantum computer attacks."

The system they've experimented with was tested on a 3-node (computer) network, but it's worth pointing out that while the team is claiming victory so far, this kind of research remains hypothetical at this point, and the study has yet to undergo peer-review.

But given the looming technological avalanche that quantum computers represent for digital security, all we'll say is we're glad scientists are working on this while there's still time.

Because, make no doubt, the future is headed this way fast.

The study has been published on pre-print website arXiv.org.

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Scientists claim to have invented the world's first quantum-proof ... - ScienceAlert