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With an ability to analyze and rapidly process extremely large datasets, quantum computing promises to enable transformational advances in everything from the rapid discovery of new drugs and vaccines to secure storage and transmission of personal information. The key to the speed of quantum computers lies in qubits, the basic units of information that can exist in multiple states, a phenomenon that provides far more processing power than the binary bits of classical computers.

Quantum computers are difficult to engineer, build and program, however, because highly sensitive qubits are easily affected by environmental disturbance, referred to as noise, such as temperature fluctuations and vibrations. Most qubits also need to be cooled to absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius) to be usable. One potential solution being explored by researchers at UC Santa Barbara involves photonics, the science of using and controlling photons, which is the smallest unit of light. Photonic circuits can transfer data faster than traditional electronic circuits, and today power data centers and make the internet possible.

Photons have several potential advantages for quantum computing, most notably room-temperature operation, said Galan Moody, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE). They also dont interact strongly with their environment, so they retain their quantum states for really long periods of time.

According to Moody, integrated photonics the design and fabrication of photonic devices in which all of the components, ranging from lasers to optical interconnects, are contained on one chip is especially promising. Its a field in which UCSB researchers have established themselves as world leaders.

Integrated photonics offer additional advantages, including the ability to leverage the national photonic infrastructure already developed and the high density of components that can be integrated onto a single photonic chip, said Moody. This will help with reliability, stability, and most importantly, scalability.

In support of his effort to develop a new quantum photonic platform that allows for chip-scale quantum information processing with light, Moody has received an Early CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a prestigious honor that comes with $500,000 in research funding over five years.

Its an incredible honor, and its a testament to the dedication and hard work of my students and postdocs, especially with the challenges everyone has faced this past year, said Moody. I couldnt be prouder of my group, who really made it possible for me to receive this award. It validates the vision weve been developing over the past couple of years, and it provides support for us to help drive the field of quantum photonics into exciting new directions over the next five years and beyond.

Moody says the award is a direct result of the tremendous mentoring he has received from the college and his department, as well as rewarding collaborations most notably with John Bowers, a distinguished professor of materials and ECE and the director of UCSBs Institute for Energy Efficiency (IEE).

We congratulate Professor Galan Moody on this great recognition of his work and the tremendous potential of his research on quantum photonics, said Rod Alferness, dean of the College of Engineering. We are tremendously proud to see junior faculty, like Professor Moody, rewarded for pushing the boundaries of science and technology to benefit society. I look forward to the research and mentorship this support will enable.

Conventional integrated photonic devices utilize silicon waveguides surrounded by an insulator, such as silicon dioxide, to guide light around a photonic chip. Moodys plan is to replace silicon with the III-V semiconductor alloy aluminum gallium arsenide (AlGaAs).

We expect several new important capabilities and better performance than we get from silicon, including more efficient quantum light sources, a reduced need for laser power to pump the sources, better electrical efficiency and significantly less optical loss in order to preserve the photons quantum state, said Moody.

The first stage of his project is to develop all of the necessary components to carry out certain quantum computations on a chip. These include improvements to his groups existing entangled-photon pair sources, and developing methods to convert quantum states throughout the visible and telecommunications wavelengths.

Once we fabricate, test and benchmark these components, we hope to find significant performance advantages compared to other approaches, such as silicon, Moody said.

The next phase is to design optical processor architectures and carry out some of the basic quantum operations on photons that are needed for a functional quantum computer. Lastly, they will begin to scale up their designs with the goal of demonstrating a practical and useful quantum computer using light.

While a quantum computer that can perform complex computations is a long-term goal, we expect to answer many important fundamental and practical questions in the short term, such as how can we make the most efficient quantum light source and what are the materials challenges we need to address to do this, said Moody. Our research may also lead to innovations in areas other than computing, including faster and more secure optical networks and satellite-based quantum communications.

The timing of the NSF CAREER award worked out perfectly for Moody. His research lab moved into Henley Hall, a state-of-the-art facility that opened in fall 2020. Moody also recently received the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) award from the Department of Defense to build the instrumentation needed to test the quantum photonic chips that his group will design and fabricate as part of the NSF CAREER award.

These experiments require a high level of temperature and vibrational stability, which is possible with the new lab space in Henley Hall, said Moody. This combination of state-of-the-art lab space and well-maintained shared facilities on campus, like the Nanofabrication Facility, make UCSB a really unique and exciting environment, and as a relatively new faculty member, Im fortunate to be a part of it.

The NSF funding also will jumpstart ambitious teaching and outreach programs that Moodys group has been developing, including a remote quantum teaching lab that will be accessible to online users beginning with a joint pilot program with Santa Barbara City College. They also plan to bring regional high school students from underrepresented communities to campus for an interactive quantum learning experience with the Media Arts and Technology Program, and to launch an outreach program for K-8 students and their families to learn about quantum science and engineering.

Read more:
Lighting the Way to Quantum Computers | The UCSB Current - The UCSB Current

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK IBMannounced Friday it has extended its IBM Global University Program with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to 40 schools.

IBM is now working with the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education (AABHE), 100 Black Men of America, Inc., Advancing Minorities Interest in Engineering (AMIE) and the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to better prepare HBCU students for in-demand jobs in the digital economy.

In parallel, the IBM Institute for Business Value released a newreportwith broad-ranging recommendations on how businesses can cultivate more diverse, inclusive workforces by establishing similar programs and deepening engagement with HBCUs.

IBMs HBCU program momentum has been strong in an environment where only 43% of leaders across industry and academia believe higher education prepares students with necessary workforce skills.* InSeptember 2020,IBM announcedthe investment of$100 millionin assets, technology and resources to HBCUs acrossthe United States. Through IBM Global University Programs, which include the continuously enhanced IBM Academic Initiative and IBM Skills Academy, IBM has now:

Building on this work, IBM and key HBCU ecosystem partners are now collaborating to expedite faculty and student access and use of IBMs industry resources.

In its new report,Investing in Black Technical Talent: The Power of Partnering with HBCUs,IBM describes how HBCUs succeed in realizing their mission and innovate to produce an exceptional talent pipeline, despite serious funding challenges. IBM explains its approach to broad-based HBCU collaboration with a series of best-practices for industry organizations.

IBMs series of best practices include:

To download the full report, please visit:LINK.

HBCU students continue to engage with IBM on a wide range of opportunities. These include students taking artificial intelligence, cybersecurity or cloud e-learning courses and receiving a foundational industry badge certificate in four hours. Many also attend IBMs virtual student Wednesday seminars with leading experts, such as IBM neuroscientists who discuss the implications of ethics in neurotechnology.

Statements from CollaboratorsHBCUs typically deliver a high return on investment. They have less money in their endowments, faculty is responsible for teaching a larger volume of classes per term and they receive less revenue per student than non-HBCUs. Yet, HBCUs produce almost a third of all African-American STEM graduates,** saidValinda Kennedy, HBCU Program Manager, IBM Global University Programs and co-author ofInvesting in Black Technical Talent: The Power of Partnering with HBCUs.It is both a racial equity and an economic imperative for U.S. industry competitiveness to develop the most in-demand skills and jobs for all students and seek out HBCU students who are typically underrepresented in many of the most high-demand areas.

100 Black Men of America, Inc. is proud to collaboratewith IBM to deliver these exceptional and needed resources to the HBCU community and students attending these institutions. The 100 has long supported and sought to identify mechanisms that aid in the sustainability of historically black colleges and universities. This collaboration and the access and opportunities provided by IBM will make great strides in advancing that goal, stated100 Black Men of America ChairmanThomas W. Dortch, Jr.

The American Association of Blacks in Higher Education is proud to collaborate with IBM, saidDereck Rovaris, President, AABHE. Our mission to be the premier organization to drive leadership development, access and vital issues concerning Blacks in higher education works perfectly with IBMs mission to lead in the creation, development and manufacture of the industrys most advanced information technologies.Togetherthis collaboration will enhance both organizations and the many people we serve.

IBM is a strong AMIE partnerwhose role is strategic and support is significant in developing a diverse engineering workforce through AMIE and our HBCU community.IBMs presence on AMIEs Board of Directors provides leadership for AMIEs strategies,key initiatives and programsto achieve our goal of a diverse engineering workforce, saidVeronica Nelson, Executive Director, AMIE.IBM programslike the IBM Academic Initiative and the IBM Skills Academyprovideaccess, assets and opportunities for our HBCU faculty and students to gain high-demand skills in areas like AI, cybersecurity, blockchain, quantum computing and cloud computing. IBM is a key sponsor of the annual AMIE Design Challenge introducing students to new and emerging technologies through industry collaborations and providing experiential activities like IBM Enterprise Design Thinking, which is the foundational platform for the Design Challenge. The IBM Masters and PhD Fellowship Awards program supports our HBCU students with mentoring, collaboration opportunities on disruptive technologies as well as a financial award. The IBM Blue Movement HBCU Coding Boot Camp enables and recognizes programming competencies. IBM also sponsors scholarships for the students at the 15 HBCU Schools of Engineering to support their educational pursuits. IBM continues to evolve its engagement with AMIE and the HBCU Schools of Engineering.

The IBM Skills Academy is timely in providing resources that support the creativity of my students in the Dual Degree Engineering Program atClark Atlanta University, saidDr.Olugbemiga A. Olatidoye, Professor, Dual Degree Engineering and Director, Visualization, Stimulation and Design Laboratory,Clark Atlanta University. It also allows my students to be skillful in their design thinking process, which resulted in an IBM digital badge certificate and a stackable credential for their future endeavors.

We truly value the IBM skills programs and have benefitted from the Academic Initiative, Skills Academy and Global University Awards across all five campuses, saidDr.Derrick Warren, Interim Associate Dean and MBA Director,Southern University. Over 24 faculty and staff have received instructor training and more than 300 students now have micro-certifications in AI, cloud, cybersecurity, data science, design thinking, Internet of Things, quantum computing and other offerings.

At UNCF, we have a history of supporting HBCUs as they amplify their outsized impact on the Black community, and our work would not be possible without transformational partnerships with organizations like IBM and their IBM Global University Programs, saidEd Smith-Lewis, Executive Director of UNCFs Institute for Capacity Building. We are excited to bring the resources of IBM to HBCUs, their faculty, and their students.

IBM Skills Academy is an ideal platform for faculty to teach their students the latest in computing and internet technologies, saidDr. Sridhar Malkaram, WestVirginia State University. It helped the students in my Applied Data Mining course experience the state of the art in data science methods and analysis tools. The course completion badge/certificate has been an additional and useful incentive for students, which promoted their interest. The Skills Academy courses can be advantageously adapted by faculty, either as stand-alone courses or as part of existing courses.

Read more:
IBM expands its Global University Program to 40 HBCUs - WRAL Tech Wire

Dutch scientists working at the quantum research institute QuTech in the city of Delft, southeast of The Hague in the Netherlands, have built the first ever multi-node quantum network by managing to connect three quantum processors. The nodes can both store and process qubits (quantum bits) and the researchers have provided a proof of concept that quantum networks are not only achievable but capable of being scaled-up in size eventually to provide humanity with a quantum Internet.

When that happens the world will become a very different place. With massive new and computing capabilities being made available via the power of sub-atomic particles, intractable problems that would currently take many years to solve (it they could be solved at all) using conventional silicon-based super-computers will be determined within seconds.

The ultimate goal is to enable the construction of a world-wide quantum Internet wherein quantum mechanics will permit quantum devices to communicate and conjoin to create large quantum clusters of exponentially great power easily capable of solving currently unsolvable problems at enormous speed.

Qubits, the basic building blocks of quantum computers exist in a quantum state where, unlike traditional binary computing where a bit represents the value of either zero or one, qubits can exist both as zeros and ones simultaneously. Thus quantum computers can perform an incredible number of calculations at once but, due to the inherent instability of the quantum state they can collapse and disappear the instant they are exposed to an outside environment and must "decide" to take the value of a zero or one. This makes for the strong possibility that qubit calculations may, or may not, be reliable and verifiable and so a great deal of research is underway on error correction systems that would guarantee the results arrived at in a quantum calculations are true.

Say hello to Bob, Alice and Charlie, just don't look at them

A quantum Internet will come into being and continue to exist because of quantum entanglement, a remarkable physical property whereby a group of particles interact or share spatial proximity such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be determined independently of the state of the others, even when the particles are physically separated by great distances.

In other words, quantum particles can be coupled into a single fundamental connection regardless of how far apart they might be. The entanglement means that a change applied to one of the particles will instantly be echoed in the other. In quantum Internet communications, entangled particles can instantly transmit information from a qubit to its entangled other even though that other is in a quantum device on the other side of the world, or the other side of the universe come to that.

For this desired state of affairs to maintain itself, entanglement must be achieved and and maintained for as long as is required. There have already been many laboratory demonstrations, commonly using fibre optics, of a physical link between two quantum devices, but two nodes do not a network make. Thats's why QuTech's achievement is so important. In a system configuration reminiscent of the role routers play in a traditional network environment, the Dutch scientists placed a third node, which has a physical connection between the two others enabling entanglement between it and them. Thus a network was born. The researchers christened the three nodes as Bob, Alice and Charlie

So, Bob has two qubits: a memory qubit to permit the storage of an established quantum link, (in this case with Alice) and a communications qubit (to permit a link with node Charlie). Once the links with Alice and Charlie are established, Bob locally connects its own to qubits with the result that an entangled three node network exists and Alice and Charlie are linked at the quantum level despite there being no physical link between them. QuTech has also invented the world's first quantum network protocol which flags up a message to the research scientists when entanglement is successfully completed.

The next step will be to add more qubits to Bob, Alice and Charlie and develop hardware, software and a full set of protocols that will form the foundation blocks of a quantum Internet. That will be laboratory work but later on the network will be tested over real-world, operational telco fibre. Research will also be conducted into creating compatibility with data structures already in use today.

Another problem to be solved is how to enable the creation of a large-scale quantum network by increasing the distance that entanglement can be maintained. Until very recently that limit was 100 kilometres but researchers in Chinese universities have just ramped it up to 1,200 kilometres.

The greater the distance of travel, the more quantum devices and intermediary nodes can be deployed and the more powerful and resilient a quantum network and Internet will become. That will enable new applications such as quantum cryptography, completely secure, utterly private and unhackable comms and cloud computing, the discovery of new drugs and other applications in fields such as finance, education, astrophysics, aeronautics, telecoms, medicine, chemistry and many others that haven't even been thought of yet.

It might even provide answers to the riddle of the universal oneness of which we are all a miniscule part. Maybe the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything will be 43, as calculated by the supercomputer Deep Thought rather than the 42 postulated by Douglas Adams in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy". Even if that is the case, given localised quantum relativity effects and Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle it could easily be another number, until you look at it, when it turns into a living/dead cat.

Read the original:
Here comes the worlds first ever multi-node quantum network - TelecomTV

We are honoring the excellence of these individuals, celebrating what they have achieved so far, and imagining what they will continue to accomplish, said David Oxtoby, President of the American Academy. The past year has been replete with evidence of how things can get worse; this is an opportunity to illuminate the importance of art, ideas, knowledge, and leadership that can make a better world.

Yacoby holds appointments in the Physics Department and at theHarvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences(SEAS)and is a member of the National Academy of Science.

Yacobys research explores topological quantum computing, interacting electrons in layered materials, spin-based quantum computing and the development of novel quantum sensing probes such as scanning single electron transistors and color centers in diamond for unraveling the underlying microscopic physics of correlated electron systems.

Yacoby is leading a research area at theDepartment of Energys Quantum Information Science (QIS) Research Centerat Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where his work will focus on using quantum sensing techniques to explore quantum materials.

Yacoby is a member and sits on the executive committee of theHarvard QuantumInitiativeand a participant in theCenter for Integrated Quantum Materials(CIQM), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center, based at SEAS. CIQM is dedicated to studying new quantum materials with non-conventional properties that could transform signal processing and computation.

Source: Harvard University

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Quantum Computing Professor, Researcher Yacoby Elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences - HPCwire

Quantum computing expert Andrew Fursman is convinced quantum attacks in the future will pose a threat to the security of Bitcoin (BTC).

In a video, Fursman highlights that the massive computational potential of quantum machines could be capable of compromising Bitcoins security.

Its mathematically proven that if you have a device that looks like the kind of quantum computers that people want to build, then you will be capable of decrypting this information significantly better than could ever be possible with classical devices.

Fursman argues that regardless of when quantum computers come of age, a solution needs to be found.

Whether quantum computers come out tomorrow or in five years or in ten years, they are capable of being cryptographically useful. Those devices are going to be capable of doing something that you might not want if you are somebody thats keeping a secret

So its worth kind of getting into what are the different ways that the blockchains rely on cryptography, and which of those are specifically relevant to the things that quantum computers of the future might do. And how much is that really a problem for people today, versus not a problem at all? And what things are maybe not a problem yet but we might want to be thinking about working on? Better to be safe than sorry.

While Fursman says that quantum machines may place Bitcoins cryptography in jeopardy, he notes that it will not happen anytime soon.

We might need actually significantly more qubits (quantum bits, or a unit of quantum information) than are currently available. And like I sort of alluded to, we might be at the point where the largest computers that we are building today end up really becoming the foundation of one logical qubit for one of these large devices

So if we need a thousand times more qubits then we might have in a few years, you sort of have to be thinking about the growth of these things from both the error correction standpoint and the number of logical qubits that you need to go forward

And I should say some people even put the number as high as millions that you might need. So we are definitely, we are not right around the corner from this. Its not going to happen next week.

I

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Is Quantum Computing Placing Bitcoins Future in Jeopardy? Quantum Expert Andrew Fursman on Future of Crypto - The Daily Hodl