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M Squared, the photonics and quantum technology developer, today announces a significant new financing of 32.5m as it expands its backers to support its growth and technology developments.

Santander UK will be providing a 20m debt facility, allowing M Squareds founders and management team, led by Dr Graeme Malcolm OBE, to fund the acquisition of the substantial part of BGFs current shareholding along with fuelling the next stage in business and technological growth. The newly formed Scottish National Investment Bank will also support M Squared with 12.5m of growth capital.

Commenting on the transaction,Richard Mathison, Structured Finance Director, Santander UK said:Santander is delighted to have provided M Squared with 20m of debt facilities to support their strategic buyout and future growth ambitions. M Squared is a truly unique, cutting-edge, business driven by a high calibre management team, who we have got to know well over the last 10 months. Santanders debt structure provided was specifically tailored to M Squareds needs and ambitions, alongside funding provided by the Scottish National Investment Bank.

This significant investment from the newly established Scottish National Investment Bank - which is the first investment being made by the Bank - will enable M Squared to further advance its research and development. This is key to upscaling its pioneering work in quantum innovation alongside its technologies to help tackle climate change. The flexibility shown by the Scottish National Investment Bank and its patient capital approach aligned strongly with M Squareds funding requirements.

M Squareds innovations are addressing global scientific and technology challenges in fields as diverse as climate change, healthcare, quantum computing and virtual reality. Therefore, M Squareds activities will make a contribution to all three of the Scottish National Investment Banks proposed core missions to support Scotlands transition to net zero, build communities and promote equality, and harness innovation to enable our people to flourish.

Eilidh Mactaggart, CEO of the Scottish National Investment Bank said:This Glasgow based business is at the cutting edge of innovation and is a recognised world-leader in its field with huge growth potential. It is a great fit with our missions and our investment will create real economic benefit in Scotland. We worked collaboratively to provide an investment solution tailored to M Squareds needs, and our patient capital approach meant we were able to take the longer-term view that was needed. We are hugely excited about the future for M Squared and look forward to working with Graeme and his team supporting the next phase of its growth.

Earlier this year, M Squared announced it is leading the UKs largest industry-led commercial quantum computing project as part of an Innovate UK Challenge fund,DISCOVERY. M Squared has also leveraged investment as part of the projectSquare meaning that total investment has reached 50m in the year to date despite the Covid-19 pandemic.

M Squared is now at the forefront of UK efforts to commercialise revolutionary quantum technology considered a major component of central governments commitment to research and development and its future industrial strategy. This transaction provides the financial strength and independence for the business to play a significant role in the next stage of this technologys commercialisation.

Dr Graeme Malcolm OBE, Founder & CEO of M Squared, said:M Squared makes the world's purest light - technology that has transformative, real-world, applications that can take on the climate emergency, greatly improve biomedical imaging, realise the next evolution of semiconductors, and now truly unlock the coming quantum age.

Scotland is at the heart of the UKs advanced science and technology sectors and sitting alongside world-leading universities and commercial partners it has become a critical hub of excellence from which we can continue expanding globally.

Our commercial and technological potential is enormous and with this transaction we have the ideal financial and structural platform to progress and realise substantial growth and launch major new developments. We are delighted to now be working with both Santander UK and the Scottish National Investment Bank, alongside continued support from BGF, on funding a shared goal to innovate and scale.

BGF will realise the majority of its existing shareholding in M Squared, but will continue to retain a meaningful stake going forward having first invested in the business in 2012 as a long-term partner.

Patrick Graham Head of BGF for Central Scotland and Northern Ireland said:M Squared, one of BGFs first investments, received 6.4m across three rounds of funding over the course of the past eight years. The company has grown ten-fold since, crystalising a strong return for BGF. Our long-term view on investment and supporting growth via follow-on funding can provide a strong platform for businesses like M Squared to realise their full potential. Our flexible model also allows us to collaborate with other institutions and we are pleased to be partnering with both Santander and the Scottish National Investment Bank in its first investment. We are also delighted to continue as an equity shareholder in M Squared and look forward to supporting the management team and the business in the next phase of its growth journey.

M Squareds strategic stakeholders including Scottish Enterprise, the University of Strathclyde and the University of St Andrews were highly supportive of this new funding development which represents one of Scotlands most ambitious funding projects this year and will further help Glasgow gain recognition as a global location for quantum and many other advanced technologies.

Stuart Malcolm, M Squareds General Counsel, who led the transaction said:This financing is the culmination of over 18 months determined effort and commitment to ensure that M Squared is now supremely well placed for the next stage in our journey. A challenging and technical transaction such as this, involving a number of stakeholders and inputs, required a proactive and agile advisory team and our thanks go out to all the team members in their efforts and determination to complete this dynamic transaction.

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M Squared Receives Financing to Accelerate Growth and Advance Quantum Technologies - Novus Light Technologies Today

ISTANBUL - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that his country, an official candidate for European Union membership, sees itself as an inseparable part of Europe but will not give in to attacks and double standards.

"We see ourselves as an inseparable part of Europe... However this does not mean that we will bow down to overt attacks to our country and nation, veiled injustices and double standards," Erdogan said in a speech to the members of its AK Party.

Turkey's drilling activities in a disputed part of the eastern Mediterranean have raised tensions with the EU as Turkey locked in a dispute with and Greece and Cyprus over the extent of their continental shelves and hydrocarbon resources.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said this month that Turkey's rhetoric on Cyprus was aggravating tensions with the EU and Ankara had to understand that its behaviour was "widening its separation" from the bloc.

The EU will discuss Turkey's pursuit of natural gas exploration in contested waters in the eastern Mediterranean at their next summit in December, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday.

"We do not believe that we have any problems with countries or institutions that cannot be solved through politics, dialogue and negotiations," Erdogan said.

Erdogan, connected to the event through videolink, said that the EU should keep its promises regarding the migrants issue and making Turkey a full member of the bloc. He was referring to a 2016 deal under which Ankara curbed migrant entries into Europe in exchange for financial help and visa-free travel in the Schengen region.

Turkey recently extended the seismic survey work being carried out by its Oruc Reis ship in a disputed part of the eastern Mediterranean until Nov. 29, according to a naval notice.

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Erdogan Says Turkey Sees Itself as Part of Europe - Voice of America

Speaking during a virtual meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Turkey's president said member states have been working on cooperating to solve economic problems for some time, but are yet to achieve the coordination they want.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has urged Muslim-majority countries to step up unique efforts to ease currency pressure on our economies, including using local currencies for trade."

Speaking during a virtual meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation's (OIC) Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation (COMCEC) on Wednesday, Erdogan said COMCEC members have been working on this for some time, but have yet to achieve the coordination they want.

Turkey has long advocated more use of local currencies for international trade instead of the dollar or euro.

"As Islamic countries, the more we produce, the more we strengthen our economies, he stressed.

We should take steps towards value-added production and trade instead of export structures based on raw materials or semi-finished products," the president added.

READ MORE:Turkey pledges to enhance financial institutions, democracy

The future will see the worlds interest-based economic system replaced by participation based on risk-sharing, said Erdogan.

"In this case, it is important to expand the use of products such as Sukuk to finance large long-term infrastructure investments," he said.

A Sukuk is an Islamic financial certificate, similar to a bond in Western finance, which complies with Islamic law.

Saying that COMCEC countries should take active measures to prevent the coronavirus pandemic from harming foreign trade, Erdogan added, "The steps we will take to boost trade among COMCEC member countries are important."

Islamophobia protected by European heads of state

On anti-Muslim sentiment, Erdogan said that in some European countries the plague has become a policy that is personally protected by the head of state.

In recent days,Erdoganhas singled out French President Emmanuel Macron for his anti-Muslim policies.

Muslims are being subjected to the same campaign of hatred that Jews faced in Europe before World War II,Erdogantold the meeting.

Fighting anti-Islam prejudice and xenophobia is a requirement of our responsibility towards our brothers and sisters living in those lands, Erdogan stressed, adding that Islamic countries have to fight the cultural racism that surrounds the West like a plague within law and democracy by using international platforms.

Last month, Macron accused French Muslims of "separatism," and described Islam as a "religion in crisis."

Macron's remarks and his defense of offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad have triggered boycotts of French products in several countries, including Qatar, Kuwait, Algeria, Sudan, Palestine, and Morocco.

'Taking care of Jerusalem program'

We have launched a new program within COMCEC to take care of Jerusalem, a holy city for Muslims and possible capital of a Palestinian state, Erdogan said.

Through this program, we aim to both strengthen its economy and improve the socio-economic situation of the people of Jerusalem, he said.

COMCEC member states are sure to fully support the program, which will enhance the welfare of people in the occupied holy city, he said.

The unity, solidarity, and effective cooperation among us will be the key to our success in the Palestinian cause and in other fields, he said.

Palestinian territories, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, have been occupied by Israel since 1967.

The Palestinians want the territories back for the establishment of a future Palestinian state.

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Erdogan calls on Islamic nations to work together to ease currency pressure - TRT World

November 23, 2020• Physics 13, 183

Classical computers can efficiently simulate the behavior of quantum computers if the quantum computer is imperfect enough.

With a few quantum bits, an ideal quantum computer can process vast amounts of information in a coordinated way, making it significantly more powerful than a classical counterpart. This predicted power increase will be great for users but is bad for physicists trying to simulate on a classical computer how an ideal quantum computer will behave. Now, a trio of researchers has shown that they can substantially reduce the resources needed to do these simulations if the quantum computer is imperfect [1]. The arXiv version of the trios paper is one of the most Scited papers of 2020 and the result generated quite a stir when it first appeared back in FebruaryI overheard it being enthusiastically discussed at the Quantum Optics Conference in Obergurgl, Austria, at the end of that month, back when we could still attend conferences in person.

In 2019, Google claimed to have achieved the quantum computing milestone known as quantum advantage, publishing results showing that their quantum computer Sycamore had performed a calculation that was essentially impossible for a classical one [2]. More specifically, Google claimed that they had completed a three-minute quantum computationwhich involved generating random numbers with Sycamores 53 qubitsthat would take thousands of years on a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer, such as IBMs Summit. IBM quickly countered the claim, arguing that more efficient memory storage would reduce the task time on a classical computer to a couple of days [3]. The claims and counterclaims sparked an industry clash and an intense debate among supporters in the two camps.

Resolving the disparity between these estimates is one of the goals of the new work by Yiqing Zhou, of the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, and her two colleagues [1]. In their study, they focused on algorithms for classically replicating imperfect quantum computers, which are also known as NISQ (noisy intermediate-scale quantum) devices [4]. Todays state-of-the-art quantum computersincluding Sycamoreare NISQ devices. The algorithms the team used are based on so-called tensor network methods, specifically matrix product states (MPS), which are good for simulating noise and so are naturally suited for studying NISQ devices. MPS methods approximate low-entangled quantum states with simpler structures, so they provide a data-compression-like protocol that can make it less computationally expensive to classically simulate imperfect quantum computers (see Viewpoint: Pushing Tensor Networks to the Limit).

Zhou and colleagues first consider a random 1D quantum circuit made of neighboring, interleaved two-qubit gates and single-qubit random unitary operations. The two-qubit gates are either Controlled-NOT gates or Controlled-Z (CZ) gates, which create entanglement. They ran their algorithm for NISQ circuits containing different numbers of qubits, N, and different depths, Da parameter that relates to the number of gates the circuit executes (Fig. 1). They also varied a parameter in the MPS algorithm. is the so-called bond dimension of the MPS and essentially controls how well the MPS capture entanglement between qubits.

The trio demonstrate that they can exactly simulate any imperfect quantum circuit if D and N are small enough and is set to a value within reach of a classical computer. They can do that because shallow quantum circuits can only create a small amount of entanglement, which is fully captured by a moderate . However, as D increases, the team finds that cannot capture all the entanglement. That means that they cannot exactly simulate the system, and errors start to accumulate. The team describes this mismatch between the quantum circuit and their classical simulations using a parameter that they call the two-qubit gate fidelity fn. They find that the fidelity of their simulations slowly drops, bottoming out at an asymptotic value f as D increases. This qualitative behavior persists for different values of N and . Also, while their algorithm does not explicitly account for all the error and decoherence mechanisms in real quantum computers, they show that it does produce quantum states of the same quality (perfection) as the experimental ones.

In light of Googles quantum advantage claims, Zhou and colleagues also apply their algorithm to 2D quantum systemsSycamore is built on a 2D chip. MPS are specifically designed for use in 1D systems, but the team uses well-known techniques to extend their algorithm to small 2D ones. They use their algorithm to simulate an N=54, D=20 circuit, roughly matching the parameters of Sycamore (Sycamore has 54 qubits but one is unusable because of a defect). They replace Googles more entangling iSWAP gates with less entangling CZ gates, which allow them to classically simulate the system up to the same fidelity as reported in Ref. [2] with a single laptop. The simulation cost should increase quadratically for iSWAP-gate circuits, and although the team proposes a method for performing such simulations, they have not yet carried them out because of the large computational cost it entails.

How do these results relate to the quantum advantage claims by Google? As they stand, they do not weaken or refute claimswith just a few more qubits, and an increase in D or f, the next generation of NISQ devices will certainly be much harder to simulate. The results also indicate that the teams algorithm only works if the quantum computer is sufficiently imperfectif it is almost perfect, their algorithm provides no speed up advantage. Finally, the results provide numerical insight into the values of N, D, f, and for which random quantum circuits are confined to a tiny corner of the exponentially large Hilbert space. These values give insight into how to quantify the capabilities of a quantum computer to generate entanglement as a function of f, for example.

So, whats next? One natural question is, Can the approach here be transferred to efficiently simulate other aspects of quantum computing, such as quantum error correction? The circuits the trio considered are essentially random, whereas quantum error correction circuits are more ordered by design [5]. That means that updates to the new algorithm are needed to study such systems. Despite this limitation, the future looks promising for the efficient simulation of imperfect quantum devices [6, 7].

Jordi Tura is an assistant professor at the Lorentz Institute of the University of Leiden, Netherlands. He also leads the institutes Applied Quantum Algorithms group. Tura obtained his B.Sc. degrees in mathematics and telecommunications and his M.Sc. in applied mathematics from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Spain. His Ph.D. was awarded by the Institute of Photonic Sciences, Spain. During his postdoctoral stay at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, Tura started working in the field of quantum information processing for near-term quantum devices.

A nanopatterned magnetic structure features an unprecedently strong coupling between lattice vibrations and quantized spin waves, which could lead to novel ways of manipulating quantum information. Read More

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Imperfections Lower the Simulation Cost of Quantum Computers - Physics

BEIJING--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The preliminary round of the 2020-2021 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC20-21) officially kicked off on November 16, 2020. More than 300 university teams from five continents registered to participate in this competition. Over the next two months, they will be challenged in several cutting-edge applications of Supercomputing and AI. The 20 teams that eventually make out of the preliminaries will participate in the finals from May 8 to 12, 2021 at Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. During the finals, they will compete for various awards including the Champion, Silver Prize, Highest LINPACK, and e- Prize.

Among the registered participants for ASC20-21 are three prior champion teams: the SC19/SC20 champion team of Tsinghua University, the ISC20 champion team of University of Science and Technology of China, and the ASC19 champion of National Tsing Hua University. Other power competitors include teams from University of Washington (USA), University of Warsaw (Poland), Ural Federal University (Russia), Monash University (Australia), EAFIT University (Columbia) and so much more.

For the tasks of this preliminary round of merged ASC20 and ASC21, the organizing committee has retained the quantum computing simulation and language exam tasks from the ASC20, and added a new fascinating, cutting-edge task in astronomy -- searching for pulsars.

Pulsars are fast-spinning neutron stars, and remnants of collapsed super stars. Pulsars feature a high density and strong magnetic field. By observing and studying the extreme physic of pulsars, the scientists can delve into the mysterious space around black holes and detect the gravitational waves triggered from the intense merge of super massive black holes in distant galaxies. Because of the unique nature of pulsars, the Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded twice for pulsar-related discoveries. Using radio telescopes over the previous decades, astronomers have discovered nearly 3,000 pulsars with 700 being discovered by PRESTO, the open-source pulsar search and analysis software. In ASC20-21, the participants are asked to use PRESTO from its official website, and the observational data from Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), the worlds largest single-dish radio telescope located in Guizhou, China, operated by National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Participating teams should achieve the applications maximum parallel acceleration, while searching for a pulsar in the FAST observational data loaded in the computer cluster they build. Practically the teams will need to understand the pulsar search process, complete the search task, analyze the code, and optimize the PRESTO application execution, by minimizing the computing time and resources.

The quantum computing simulation task will require each participating team to use the QuEST (Quantum Exact Simulation Toolkit) running on computer cluster to simulate 30 qubits in two cases: quantum random circuits (random.c), and quantum fast Fourier transform circuits (GHZ_QFT.c). Quantum simulations provides a reliable platform for studying of quantum algorithms, which are particularly important because quantum computers are not practically available yet in the industry.

The Language Exam task will require all participating teams to train AI models on an English Cloze Test dataset, striving to achieve the highest "test scores". The dataset covers multiple levels of English language tests used in China.

This years ASC training camp will be held on November 30 to help the participating teams from all around the world prepare for the competition. HPC and AI experts from Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peng Cheng Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of High-end Server & Storage Technology will introduce in details the competition rules, computer cluster build and optimization, and provide guidance.

About ASC

The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge is the worlds largest student supercomputer competition, sponsored and organized by Asia Supercomputer Community in China and supported by Asian, European, and American experts and institutions. The main objectives of ASC are to encourage exchange and training of young supercomputing talent from different countries, improve supercomputing applications and R&D capacity, boost the development of supercomputing, and promote technical and industrial innovation. The first ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge was held in 2012 and since has attracted nearly 10,000 undergraduates from all over the world. Learn more ASC at https://www.asc-events.org/.

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ASC20-21 Student Supercomputer Challenge Kickoff: Quantum Computing Simulations, AI Language Exam and Pulsar Searching with FAST - Business Wire