Tag Archives: quantum computing

Quantum Mechanics & Gravity conference (August 15 – 19, 2022) launches Vancouver (Canada)-based Quantum Gravity Institute and more

Leave a reply

I received (via email) a July 21, 2022 news release about the launch of a quantum science initiative in Vancouver (BTW, I have more about the Canadian quantum scene later in this post),

World’s top physicists unite to tackle one of Science’s greatest
mysteries

Vancouver-based Quantum Gravity Society leads international quest to
discover Theory of Quantum Gravity

Vancouver, B.C. (July 21, 2022): More than two dozen of the world’s
top physicists, including three Nobel Prize winners, will gather in
Vancouver this August for a Quantum Gravity Conference that will host
the launch a Vancouver-based Quantum Gravity Institute (QGI) and a
new global research collaboration that could significantly advance our
understanding of physics and gravity and profoundly change the world as
we know it.

For roughly 100 years, the world’s understanding of physics has been
based on Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (GR), which
explored the theory of space, time and gravity, and quantum mechanics
(QM), which focuses on the behaviour of matter and light on the atomic
and subatomic scale. GR has given us a deep understanding of the cosmos,
leading to space travel and technology like atomic clocks, which govern
global GPS systems. QM is responsible for most of the equipment that
runs our world today, including the electronics, lasers, computers, cell
phones, plastics, and other technologies that support modern
transportation, communications, medicine, agriculture, energy systems
and more.

While each theory has led to countless scientific breakthroughs, in many
cases, they are incompatible and seemingly contradictory. Discovering a
unifying connection between these two fundamental theories, the elusive
Theory of Quantum Gravity, could provide the world with a deeper
understanding of time, gravity and matter and how to potentially control
them. It could also lead to new technologies that would affect most
aspects of daily life, including how we communicate, grow food, deliver
health care, transport people and goods, and produce energy.

“Discovering the Theory of Quantum Gravity could lead to the
possibility of time travel, new quantum devices, or even massive new
energy resources that produce clean energy and help us address climate
change,” said Philip Stamp, Professor, Department of Physics and
Astronomy, University of British Columbia, and Visiting Associate in
Theoretical Astrophysics at Caltech [California Institute of Technology]. “The potential long-term ramifications of this discovery are so incredible that life on earth 100
years from now could look as miraculous to us now as today’s
technology would have seemed to people living 100 years ago.”

The new Quantum Gravity Institute and the conference were founded by the
Quantum Gravity Society, which was created in 2022 by a group of
Canadian technology, business and community leaders, and leading
physicists. Among its goals are to advance the science of physics and
facilitate research on the Theory of Quantum Gravity through initiatives
such as the conference and assembling the world’s leading archive of
scientific papers and lectures associated with the attempts to reconcile
these two theories over the past century.

Attending the Quantum Gravity Conference in Vancouver (August 15-19 [2022])
will be two dozen of the world’s top physicists, including Nobel
Laureates Kip Thorne, Jim Peebles and Sir Roger Penrose, as well as
physicists Baron Martin Rees, Markus Aspelmeyer, Viatcheslav Mukhanov
and Paul Steinhardt. On Wednesday, August 17, the conference will be
open to the public, providing them with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
to attend keynote addresses from the world’s pre-eminent physicists.
… A noon-hour discussion on the importance of the
research will be delivered by Kip Thorne, the former Feynman Professor
of physics at Caltech. Thorne is well known for his popular books, and
for developing the original idea for the 2014 film “Interstellar.” He
was also crucial to the development of the book “Contact” by Carl Sagan,
which was also made into a motion picture.

“We look forward to welcoming many of the world’s brightest minds to
Vancouver for our first Quantum Gravity Conference,” said Frank
Giustra, CEO Fiore Group and Co-Founder, Quantum Gravity Society. “One
of the goals of our Society will be to establish Vancouver as a
supportive home base for research and facilitate the scientific
collaboration that will be required to unlock this mystery that has
eluded some of the world’s most brilliant physicists for so long.”

“The format is key,” explains Terry Hui, UC Berkley Physics alumnus
and Co-Founder, Quantum Gravity Society [and CEO of Concord Pacific].
“Like the Solvay Conference nearly 100 years ago, the Quantum Gravity
Conference will bring top scientists together in salon-style gatherings. The
relaxed evening format following the conference will reduce barriers and
allow these great minds to freely exchange ideas. I hope this will help accelerate
the solution of this hundred-year bottleneck between theories relatively
soon.”

“As amazing as our journey of scientific discovery has been over the
past century, we still have so much to learn about how the universe
works on a macro, atomic and subatomic level,” added Paul Lee,
Managing Partner, Vanedge Capital, and Co-Founder, Quantum Gravity
Society. “New experiments and observations capable of advancing work
on this scientific challenge are becoming increasingly possible in
today’s physics labs and using new astronomical tools. The Quantum
Gravity Society looks forward to leveraging that growing technical
capacity with joint theory and experimental work that harnesses the
collective expertise of the world’s great physicists.”

About Quantum Gravity Society

Quantum Gravity Society was founded in Vancouver, Canada in 2020 by a
group of Canadian business, technology and community leaders, and
leading international physicists. The Society’s founding members
include Frank Giustra (Fiore Group), Terry Hui (Concord Pacific), Paul
Lee and Moe Kermani (Vanedge Capital) and Markus Frind (Frind Estate
Winery), along with renowned physicists Abhay Ashtekar, Sir Roger
Penrose, Philip Stamp, Bill Unruh and Birgitta Whaley. For more
information, visit Quantum Gravity Society.

About the Quantum Gravity Conference (Vancouver 2022)

The inaugural Quantum Gravity Conference (August 15-19 [2022]) is presented by
Quantum Gravity Society, Fiore Group, Vanedge Capital, Concord Pacific,
The Westin Bayshore, Vancouver and Frind Estate Winery. For conference
information, visit conference.quantumgravityinstitute.ca. To
register to attend the conference, visit Eventbrite.com.

The front page on the Quantum Gravity Society website is identical to the front page for the Quantum Mechanics & Gravity: Marrying Theory & Experiment conference website. It’s probable that will change with time.

This seems to be an in-person event only.

The site for the conference is in an exceptionally pretty location in Coal Harbour and it’s close to Stanley Park (a major tourist attraction),

The Westin Bayshore, Vancouver
1601 Bayshore Drive
Vancouver, BC V6G 2V4
View map

Assuming that most of my readers will be interested in the ‘public’ day, here’s more from the Wednesday, August 17, 2022 registration page on Eventbrite,

Tickets:

  • Corporate Table of 8 all day access – includes VIP Luncheon: $1,100
  • Ticket per person all day access – includes VIP Luncheon: $129
  • Ticket per person all day access (no VIP luncheon): $59
  • Student / Academia Ticket – all day access (no VIP luncheon): $30

Date:

Wednesday, August 17, 2022 @ 9:00 a.m. – 5:15 p.m. (PT)

Schedule:

  • Registration Opens: 8:00 a.m.
  • Morning Program: 9:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
  • VIP Lunch: 12:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
  • Afternoon Program: 2:30 p.m. – 4:20 p.m.
  • Public Discussion / Debate: 4:20 p.m. – 5:15 p.m.

Program:

9:00 a.m. Session 1: Beginning of the Universe

  • Viatcheslav Mukhanov – Theoretical Physicist and Cosmologist, University of Munich
  • Paul Steinhardt – Theoretical Physicist, Princeton University

Session 2: History of the Universe

  • Jim Peebles, 2019 Nobel Laureate, Princeton University
  • Baron Martin Rees – Cosmologist and Astrophysicist, University of Cambridge
  • Sir Roger Penrose, 2020 Nobel Laureate, University of Oxford (via zoom)

12:30 p.m. VIP Lunch Session: Quantum Gravity — Why Should We Care?

  • Kip Thorne – 2017 Nobel Laureate, Executive Producer of blockbuster film “Interstellar”

2:30 p.m. Session 3: What do Experiments Say?

  • Markus Aspelmeyer – Experimental Physicist, Quantum Optics and Optomechanics Leader, University of Vienna
  • Sir Roger Penrose – 2020 Nobel Laureate (via zoom)

Session 4: Time Travel

  • Kip Thorne – 2017 Nobel Laureate, Executive Producer of blockbuster film “Interstellar”

Event Partners

  • Quantum Gravity Society
  • Westin Bayshore
  • Fiore Group
  • Concord Pacific
  • VanEdge Capital
  • Frind Estate Winery

Marketing Partners

  • BC Business Council
  • Greater Vancouver Board of Trade

Please note that Sir Roger Penrose will be present via Zoom but all the others will be there in the room with you.

Given that Kip Thorne won his 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish) for work on gravitational waves, it’s surprising there’s no mention of this in the publicity for a conference on quantum gravity. Finding gravitational waves in 2016 was a very big deal (see Josh Fischman’s and Steve Mirsky’s February 11, 2016 interview with Kip Thorne for Scientific American).

Some thoughts on this conference and the Canadian quantum scene

This conference has a fascinating collection of players. Even I recognized some of the names, e.g., Penrose, Rees, Thorne.

The academics were to be expected and every presenter is an academic, often with their own Wikipedia page. Weirdly, there’s no one from the Perimeter Institute Institute for Theoretical Physics or TRIUMF (a national physics laboratory and centre for particle acceleration) or from anywhere else in Canada, which may be due to their academic specialty rather than an attempt to freeze out Canadian physicists. In any event, the conference academics are largely from the US (a lot of them from CalTech and Stanford) and from the UK.

The business people are a bit of a surprise. The BC Business Council and the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade? Frank Giustra who first made his money with gold mines, then with Lionsgate Entertainment, and who continues to make a great deal of money with his equity investment company, Fiore Group? Terry Hui, Chief Executive Office of Concord Pacific, a real estate development company? VanEdge Capital, an early stage venture capital fund? A winery? Missing from this list is D-Wave Systems, Canada’s quantum calling card and local company. While their area of expertise is quantum computing, I’d still expect to see them present as sponsors. *ETA December 6, 2022: I just looked at the conference page again and D-Wave is now listed as a sponsor.*

The academics? These people are not cheap dates (flights, speaker’s fees, a room at the Bayshore, meals). This is a very expensive conference and $129 for lunch and a daypass is likely a heavily subsidized ticket.

Another surprise? No government money/sponsorship. I don’t recall seeing another academic conference held in Canada without any government participation.

Canadian quantum scene

A National Quantum Strategy was first announced in the 2021 Canadian federal budget and reannounced in the 2022 federal budget (see my April 19, 2022 posting for a few more budget details).. Or, you may find this National Quantum Strategy Consultations: What We Heard Report more informative. There’s also a webpage for general information about the National Quantum Strategy.

As evidence of action, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) announced new grant programmes made possible by the National Quantum Strategy in a March 15, 2022 news release,

Quantum science and innovation are giving rise to promising advances in communications, computing, materials, sensing, health care, navigation and other key areas. The Government of Canada is committed to helping shape the future of quantum technology by supporting Canada’s quantum sector and establishing leadership in this emerging and transformative domain.

Today [March 15, 2022], the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, is announcing an investment of $137.9 million through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s (NSERC) Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) grants and Alliance grants. These grants are an important next step in advancing the National Quantum Strategy and will reinforce Canada’s research strengths in quantum science while also helping to develop a talent pipeline to support the growth of a strong quantum community.

…

Quick facts

Budget 2021 committed $360 million to build the foundation for a National Quantum Strategy, enabling the Government of Canada to build on previous investments in the sector to advance the emerging field of quantum technologies. The quantum sector is key to fuelling Canada’s economy, long-term resilience and growth, especially as technologies mature and more sectors harness quantum capabilities.

Development of quantum technologies offers job opportunities in research and science, software and hardware engineering and development, manufacturing, technical support, sales and marketing, business operations and other fields.

The Government of Canada also invested more than $1 billion in quantum research and science from 2009 to 2020—mainly through competitive granting agency programs, including Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada programs and the Canada First Research Excellence Fund—to help establish Canada as a global leader in quantum science.

In addition, the government has invested in bringing new quantum technologies to market, including investments through Canada’s regional development agencies, the Strategic Innovation Fund and the National Research Council of Canada’s Industrial Research Assistance Program.

Bank of Canada, cryptocurrency, and quantum computing

My July 25, 2022 posting features a special project, Note: All emphases are mine,

… (from an April 14, 2022 HKA Marketing Communications news release on EurekAlert),

Multiverse Computing, a global leader in quantum computing solutions for the financial industry and beyond with offices in Toronto and Spain, today announced it has completed a proof-of-concept project with the Bank of Canada through which the parties used quantum computing to simulate the adoption of cryptocurrency as a method of payment by non-financial firms.

“We are proud to be a trusted partner of the first G7 central bank to explore modelling of complex networks and cryptocurrencies through the use of quantum computing,” said Sam Mugel, CTO [Chief Technical Officer] at Multiverse Computing. “The results of the simulation are very intriguing and insightful as stakeholders consider further research in the domain. Thanks to the algorithm we developed together with our partners at the Bank of Canada, we have been able to model a complex system reliably and accurately given the current state of quantum computing capabilities.”

…

Multiverse Computing conducted its innovative work related to applying quantum computing for modelling complex economic interactions in a research project with the Bank of Canada. The project explored quantum computing technology as a way to simulate complex economic behaviour that is otherwise very difficult to simulate using traditional computational techniques.

By implementing this solution using D-Wave’s annealing quantum computer, the simulation was able to tackle financial networks as large as 8-10 players, with up to 2^90 possible network configurations. Note that classical computing approaches cannot solve large networks of practical relevance as a 15-player network requires as many resources as there are atoms in the universe.

…

Quantum Technologies and the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA)

In a May 26, 2022 blog posting the CCA announced its Expert Panel on Quantum Technologies (they will be issuing a Quantum Technologies report),

The emergence of quantum technologies will impact all sectors of the Canadian economy, presenting significant opportunities but also risks. At the request of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) has formed an Expert Panel to examine the impacts, opportunities, and challenges quantum technologies present for Canadian industry, governments, and Canadians. Raymond Laflamme, O.C., FRSC, Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information and Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo, will serve as Chair of the Expert Panel.

“Quantum technologies have the potential to transform computing, sensing, communications, healthcare, navigation and many other areas,” said Dr. Laflamme. “But a close examination of the risks and vulnerabilities of these technologies is critical, and I look forward to undertaking this crucial work with the panel.”

As Chair, Dr. Laflamme will lead a multidisciplinary group with expertise in quantum technologies, economics, innovation, ethics, and legal and regulatory frameworks. The Panel will answer the following question:

In light of current trends affecting the evolution of quantum technologies, what impacts, opportunities and challenges do these present for Canadian industry, governments and Canadians more broadly?

…

The Expert Panel on Quantum Technologies:

Raymond Laflamme, O.C., FRSC (Chair), Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information; the Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis John von Neumann Chair in Quantum Information; Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo

Sally Daub, Founder and Managing Partner, Pool Global Partners

Shohini Ghose, Professor, Physics and Computer Science, Wilfrid Laurier University; NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering

Paul Gulyas, Senior Innovation Executive, IBM Canada

Mark W. Johnson, Senior Vice-President, Quantum Technologies and Systems Products, D-Wave Systems

Elham Kashefi, Professor of Quantum Computing, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh; Directeur de recherche au CNRS, LIP6 Sorbonne Université

Mauritz Kop, Fellow and Visiting Scholar, Stanford Law School, Stanford University

Dominic Martin, Professor, Département d’organisation et de ressources humaines, École des sciences de la gestion, Université du Québec à Montréal

Darius Ornston, Associate Professor, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto

Barry Sanders, FRSC, Director, Institute for Quantum Science and Technology, University of Calgary

Eric Santor, Advisor to the Governor, Bank of Canada

Christian Sarra-Bournet, Quantum Strategy Director and Executive Director, Institut quantique, Université de Sherbrooke

Stephanie Simmons, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair in Quantum Nanoelectronics, and CIFAR Quantum Information Science Fellow, Department of Physics, Simon Fraser University

Jacqueline Walsh, Instructor; Director, initio Technology & Innovation Law Clinic, Dalhousie University

You’ll note that both the Bank of Canada and D-Wave Systems are represented on this expert panel.

The CCA Quantum Technologies report (in progress) page can be found here.

Does it mean anything?

Since I only skim the top layer of information (disparagingly described as ‘high level’ by the technology types I used to work with), all I can say is there’s a remarkable level of interest from various groups who are self-organizing. (The interest is international as well. I found the International Society for Quantum Gravity [ISQG], which had its first meeting in 2021.)

I don’t know what the purpose is other than it seems the Canadian focus seems to be on money. The board of trade and business council have no interest in primary research and the federal government’s national quantum strategy is part of Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) Canada’s mandate. You’ll notice ‘science’ is sandwiched between ‘innovation’, which is often code for business, and economic development.

The Bank of Canada’s monetary interests are quite obvious.

The Perimeter Institute mentioned earlier was founded by Mike Lazaridis (from his Wikipedia entry) Note: Links have been removed,

… a Canadian businessman [emphasis mine], investor in quantum computing technologies, and founder of BlackBerry, which created and manufactured the BlackBerry wireless handheld device. With an estimated net worth of US$800 million (as of June 2011), Lazaridis was ranked by Forbes as the 17th wealthiest Canadian and 651st in the world.[4]

…

In 2000, Lazaridis founded and donated more than $170 million to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.[11][12] He and his wife Ophelia founded and donated more than $100 million to the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in 2002.[8]

That Institute for Quantum Computing? There’s an interesting connection. Raymond Laflamme, the chair for the CCA expert panel, was its director for a number of years and he’s closely affiliated with the Perimeter Institute. (I’m not suggesting anything nefarious or dodgy. It’s a small community in Canada and relationships tend to be tightly interlaced.) I’m surprised he’s not part of the quantum mechanics and gravity conference but that could have something to do with scheduling.

One last interesting bit about Laflamme, from his Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed)

…

As Stephen Hawking’s PhD student, he first became famous for convincing Hawking that time does not reverse in a contracting universe, along with Don Page. Hawking told the story of how this happened in his famous book A Brief History of Time in the chapter The Arrow of Time.[3] Later on Laflamme made a name for himself in quantum computing and quantum information theory, which is what he is famous for today.

…

Getting back to the Quantum Mechanics & Gravity: Marrying Theory & Experiment, the public day looks pretty interesting and when is the next time you’ll have a chance to hobnob with all those Nobel Laureates?

Bank of Canada and Multiverse Computing model complex networks & cryptocurrencies with quantum computing

Leave a reply

Given all the concern over rising inflation (McGill University press room, February 23, 2022 “Experts: Canadian inflation hits a new three-decade high” and Bank of Canada rates (Pete Evans in an April 13, 2022 article for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s online news), this news release was a little unexpected both for timing (one week after the 2022 Canadian federal budget was delivered) and content (from an April 14, 2022 HKA Marketing Communications news release on EurekAlert),

Multiverse Computing, a global leader in quantum computing solutions for the financial industry and beyond with offices in Toronto and Spain, today announced it has completed a proof-of-concept project with the Bank of Canada through which the parties used quantum computing to simulate the adoption of cryptocurrency as a method of payment by non-financial firms.

“We are proud to be a trusted partner of the first G7 central bank to explore modelling of complex networks and cryptocurrencies through the use of quantum computing,” said Sam Mugel, CTO [Chief Technical Officer] at Multiverse Computing. “The results of the simulation are very intriguing and insightful as stakeholders consider further research in the domain. Thanks to the algorithm we developed together with our partners at the Bank of Canada, we have been able to model a complex system reliably and accurately given the current state of quantum computing capabilities.”

Companies may adopt various forms of payments. So, it’s important to develop a deep understanding of interactions that can take place in payments networks.

Multiverse Computing conducted its innovative work related to applying quantum computing for modelling complex economic interactions in a research project with the Bank of Canada. The project explored quantum computing technology as a way to simulate complex economic behaviour that is otherwise very difficult to simulate using traditional computational techniques.

By implementing this solution using D-Wave’s annealing quantum computer, the simulation was able to tackle financial networks as large as 8-10 players, with up to 2^90 possible network configurations. Note that classical computing approaches cannot solve large networks of practical relevance as a 15-player network requires as many resources as there are atoms in the universe.

“We wanted to test the power of quantum computing on a research case that is hard to solve using classical computing techniques,” said Maryam Haghighi, Director, Data Science at the Bank of Canada. “This collaboration helped us learn more about how quantum computing can provide new insights into economic problems by carrying out complex simulations on quantum hardware.”

Motivated by the empirical observations about the cooperative nature of adoption of cryptocurrency payments, this theoretical study found that for some industries, these digital assets would share the payments market with traditional bank transfers and cash-like instruments. The market share for each would depend on how the financial institutions respond to the cryptocurrency adoptions, and on the economic costs associated with such trades.

The quantum simulations helped generate examples that illustrate how similar firms may end up adopting different levels of cryptocurrency use.

About Multiverse Computing

Multiverse Computing is a leading quantum software company that applies quantum and quantum-inspired solutions to tackle complex problems in finance to deliver value today and enable a more resilient and prosperous economy. The company’s expertise in quantum control and computational methods as well as finance means it can secure maximum results from current quantum devices. Its flagship product, Singularity, allows financial professionals to leverage quantum computing with common software tools.  The company is targeting additional verticals as well, including mobility, energy, the life sciences and industry 4.0.

Contacts:

Multiverse Computing
www.multiversecomputing.com
contact@multiversecomputing.com
+346 60 94 11 54

I wish there was a little more information about the contents of the report (although it is nice to know they have one).

D-Wave Systems, for those who don’t know, is a Vancouver-area company that supplies hardware (here’s more from their Wikipedia entry), Note: Links have been removed,

D-Wave Systems Inc. is a Canadian quantum computing company, based in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. D-Wave was the world’s first company to sell computers to exploit quantum effects in their operation.[2] D-Wave’s early customers include Lockheed Martin, University of Southern California, Google/NASA and Los Alamos National Lab.

…

The company has to this point specialized in quantum annealing. This is a specific type of quantum computing best used to solve the kind of problem (analyzing a multi-player situation) that the Bank of Canada was trying to solve.

I checked out ‘Multiverse’ in Toronto and they claim this, “World leaders in quantum computing for the financial industry,” on their homepage.

As for the company that produced the news release, HKA Marketing Communications, based in Southern California, they claim this “Specialists in Quantum Tech PR: #1 agency in this space” on their homepage.

I checked out the Bank of Canada website and didn’t find anything about this project.

Creating time crystals with a quantum computer

Leave a reply

This November 30, 2021 news item on phys.org about time crystals caught my attention,

There is a huge global effort to engineer a computer capable of harnessing the power of quantum physics to carry out computations of unprecedented complexity. While formidable technological obstacles still stand in the way of creating such a quantum computer, today’s early prototypes are still capable of remarkable feats.

For example, the creation of a new phase of matter called a “time crystal.” Just as a crystal’s structure repeats in space, a time crystal repeats in time and, importantly, does so infinitely and without any further input of energy—like a clock that runs forever without any batteries. The quest to realize this phase of matter has been a longstanding challenge in theory and experiment—one that has now finally come to fruition.

In research published Nov. 30 [2021] in Nature, a team of scientists from Stanford University, Google Quantum AI, the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems and Oxford University detail their creation of a time crystal using Google’s Sycamore quantum computing hardware.

The Google Sycamore chip used in the creation of a time crystal. Credit: Google Quantum AI [downloaded from https://phys.org/news/2021-11-physicists-crystals-quantum.html]

A November 30, 2021 Stanford University news release (also on EurekAlert) by Taylor Kubota, which originated the news item, delves further into the work and into the nature of time crystals,

“The big picture is that we are taking the devices that are meant to be the quantum computers of the future and thinking of them as complex quantum systems in their own right,” said Matteo Ippoliti, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and co-lead author of the work. “Instead of computation, we’re putting the computer to work as a new experimental platform to realize and detect new phases of matter.”

For the team, the excitement of their achievement lies not only in creating a new phase of matter but in opening up opportunities to explore new regimes in their field of condensed matter physics, which studies the novel phenomena and properties brought about by the collective interactions of many objects in a system. (Such interactions can be far richer than the properties of the individual objects.)

“Time-crystals are a striking example of a new type of non-equilibrium quantum phase of matter,” said Vedika Khemani, assistant professor of physics at Stanford and a senior author of the paper. “While much of our understanding of condensed matter physics is based on equilibrium systems, these new quantum devices are providing us a fascinating window into new non-equilibrium regimes in many-body physics.”

What a time crystal is and isn’t

The basic ingredients to make this time crystal are as follows: The physics equivalent of a fruit fly and something to give it a kick. The fruit fly of physics is the Ising model, a longstanding tool for understanding various physical phenomena – including phase transitions and magnetism – which consists of a lattice where each site is occupied by a particle that can be in two states, represented as a spin up or down.

During her graduate school years, Khemani, her doctoral advisor Shivaji Sondhi, then at Princeton University, and Achilleas Lazarides and Roderich Moessner at the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems stumbled upon this recipe for making time crystals unintentionally. They were studying non-equilibrium many-body localized systems – systems where the particles get “stuck” in the state in which they started and can never relax to an equilibrium state. They were interested in exploring phases that might develop in such systems when they are periodically “kicked” by a laser. Not only did they manage to find stable non-equilibrium phases, they found one where the spins of the particles flipped between patterns that repeat in time forever, at a period twice that of the driving period of the laser, thus making a time crystal.

The periodic kick of the laser establishes a specific rhythm to the dynamics. Normally the “dance” of the spins should sync up with this rhythm, but in a time crystal it doesn’t. Instead, the spins flip between two states, completing a cycle only after being kicked by the laser twice. This means that the system’s “time translation symmetry” is broken. Symmetries play a fundamental role in physics, and they are often broken – explaining the origins of regular crystals, magnets and many other phenomena; however, time translation symmetry stands out because unlike other symmetries, it can’t be broken in equilibrium. The periodic kick is a loophole that makes time crystals possible.

The doubling of the oscillation period is unusual, but not unprecedented. And long-lived oscillations are also very common in the quantum dynamics of few-particle systems. What makes a time crystal unique is that it’s a system of millions of things that are showing this kind of concerted behavior without any energy coming in or leaking out.

“It’s a completely robust phase of matter, where you’re not fine-tuning parameters or states but your system is still quantum,” said Sondhi, professor of physics at Oxford and co-author of the paper. “There’s no feed of energy, there’s no drain of energy, and it keeps going forever and it involves many strongly interacting particles.”

While this may sound suspiciously close to a “perpetual motion machine,” a closer look reveals that time crystals don’t break any laws of physics. Entropy – a measure of disorder in the system – remains stationary over time, marginally satisfying the second law of thermodynamics by not decreasing.

Between the development of this plan for a time crystal and the quantum computer experiment that brought it to reality, many experiments by many different teams of researchers achieved various almost-time-crystal milestones. However, providing all the ingredients in the recipe for “many-body localization” (the phenomenon that enables an infinitely stable time crystal) had remained an outstanding challenge.

For Khemani and her collaborators, the final step to time crystal success was working with a team at Google Quantum AI. Together, this group used Google’s Sycamore quantum computing hardware to program 20 “spins” using the quantum version of a classical computer’s bits of information, known as qubits.

Revealing just how intense the interest in time crystals currently is, another time crystal was published in Science this month [November 2021]. That crystal was created using qubits within a diamond by researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Quantum opportunities

The researchers were able to confirm their claim of a true time crystal thanks to special capabilities of the quantum computer. Although the finite size and coherence time of the (imperfect) quantum device meant that their experiment was limited in size and duration – so that the time crystal oscillations could only be observed for a few hundred cycles rather than indefinitely – the researchers devised various protocols for assessing the stability of their creation. These included running the simulation forward and backward in time and scaling its size.

“We managed to use the versatility of the quantum computer to help us analyze its own limitations,” said Moessner, co-author of the paper and director at the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems. “It essentially told us how to correct for its own errors, so that the fingerprint of ideal time-crystalline behavior could be ascertained from finite time observations.”

A key signature of an ideal time crystal is that it shows indefinite oscillations from all states. Verifying this robustness to choice of states was a key experimental challenge, and the researchers devised a protocol to probe over a million states of their time crystal in just a single run of the machine, requiring mere milliseconds of runtime. This is like viewing a physical crystal from many angles to verify its repetitive structure.

“A unique feature of our quantum processor is its ability to create highly complex quantum states,” said Xiao Mi, a researcher at Google and co-lead author of the paper. “These states allow the phase structures of matter to be effectively verified without needing to investigate the entire computational space – an otherwise intractable task.”

Creating a new phase of matter is unquestionably exciting on a fundamental level. In addition, the fact that these researchers were able to do so points to the increasing usefulness of quantum computers for applications other than computing. “I am optimistic that with more and better qubits, our approach can become a main method in studying non-equilibrium dynamics,” said Pedram Roushan, researcher at Google and senior author of the paper.

“We think that the most exciting use for quantum computers right now is as platforms for fundamental quantum physics,” said Ippoliti. “With the unique capabilities of these systems, there’s hope that you might discover some new phenomenon that you hadn’t predicted.”

A view of the Google dilution refrigerator, which houses the Sycamore chip. Credit: Google Quantum AI [downloaded from https://scitechdaily.com/stanford-and-google-team-up-to-create-time-crystals-with-quantum-computers/]

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Time-Crystalline Eigenstate Order on a Quantum Processor by Xiao Mi, Matteo Ippoliti, Chris Quintana, Ami Greene, Zijun Chen, Jonathan Gross, Frank Arute, Kunal Arya, Juan Atalaya, Ryan Babbush, Joseph C. Bardin, Joao Basso, Andreas Bengtsson, Alexander Bilmes, Alexandre Bourassa, Leon Brill, Michael Broughton, Bob B. Buckley, David A. Buell, Brian Burkett, Nicholas Bushnell, Benjamin Chiaro, Roberto Collins, William Courtney, Dripto Debroy, Sean Demura, Alan R. Derk, Andrew Dunsworth, Daniel Eppens, Catherine Erickson, Edward Farhi, Austin G. Fowler, Brooks Foxen, Craig Gidney, Marissa Giustina, Matthew P. Harrigan, Sean D. Harrington, Jeremy Hilton, Alan Ho, Sabrina Hong, Trent Huang, Ashley Huff, William J. Huggins, L. B. Ioffe, Sergei V. Isakov, Justin Iveland, Evan Jeffrey, Zhang Jiang, Cody Jones, Dvir Kafri, Tanuj Khattar, Seon Kim, Alexei Kitaev, Paul V. Klimov, Alexander N. Korotkov, Fedor Kostritsa, David Landhuis, Pavel Laptev, Joonho Lee, Kenny Lee, Aditya Locharla, Erik Lucero, Orion Martin, Jarrod R. McClean, Trevor McCourt, Matt McEwen, Kevin C. Miao, Masoud Mohseni, Shirin Montazeri, Wojciech Mruczkiewicz, Ofer Naaman, Matthew Neeley, Charles Neill, Michael Newman, Murphy Yuezhen Niu, Thomas E. O’Brien, Alex Opremcak, Eric Ostby, Balint Pato, Andre Petukhov, Nicholas C. Rubin, Daniel Sank, Kevin J. Satzinger, Vladimir Shvarts, Yuan Su, Doug Strain, Marco Szalay, Matthew D. Trevithick, Benjamin Villalonga, Theodore White, Z. Jamie Yao, Ping Yeh, Juhwan Yoo, Adam Zalcman, Hartmut Neven, Sergio Boixo, Vadim Smelyanskiy, Anthony Megrant, Julian Kelly, Yu Chen, S. L. Sondhi, Roderich Moessner, Kostyantyn Kechedzhi, Vedika Khemani & Pedram Roushan. Nature (2021) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04257-w Published 30 November 2021

This is a preview of the unedited paper being provided by Nature. Click on the Download PDF button (to the right of the title) to get access.

Exotic magnetism: a quantum simulation from D-Wave Sytems

Leave a reply

Vancouver (Canada) area company, D-Wave Systems is trumpeting itself (with good reason) again. This 2021 ‘milestone’ achievement builds on work from 2018 (see my August 23, 2018 posting for the earlier work). For me, the big excitement was finding the best explanation for quantum annealing and D-Wave’s quantum computers that I’ve seen yet (that explanation and a link to more is at the end of this posting).

A February 18, 2021 news item on phys.org announces the latest achievement,

D-Wave Systems Inc. today [February 18, 2021] published a milestone study in collaboration with scientists at Google, demonstrating a computational performance advantage, increasing with both simulation size and problem hardness, to over 3 million times that of corresponding classical methods. Notably, this work was achieved on a practical application with real-world implications, simulating the topological phenomena behind the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics. This performance advantage, exhibited in a complex quantum simulation of materials, is a meaningful step in the journey toward applications advantage in quantum computing.

…

A February 18, 2021 D-Wave Systems press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the work in more detail,

The work by scientists at D-Wave and Google also demonstrates that quantum effects can be harnessed to provide a computational advantage in D-Wave processors, at problem scale that requires thousands of qubits. Recent experiments performed on multiple D-Wave processors represent by far the largest quantum simulations carried out by existing quantum computers to date.

The paper, entitled “Scaling advantage over path-integral Monte Carlo in quantum simulation of geometrically frustrated magnets”, was published in the journal Nature Communications (DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-20901-5, February 18, 2021). D-Wave researchers programmed the D-Wave 2000Q™ system to model a two-dimensional frustrated quantum magnet using artificial spins. The behavior of the magnet was described by the Nobel-prize winning work of theoretical physicists Vadim Berezinskii, J. Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless. They predicted a new state of matter in the 1970s characterized by nontrivial topological properties. This new research is a continuation of previous breakthrough work published by D-Wave’s team in a 2018 Nature paper entitled “Observation of topological phenomena in a programmable lattice of 1,800 qubits” (Vol. 560, Issue 7719, August 22, 2018). In this latest paper, researchers from D-Wave, alongside contributors from Google, utilize D-Wave’s lower noise processor to achieve superior performance and glean insights into the dynamics of the processor never observed before.

“This work is the clearest evidence yet that quantum effects provide a computational advantage in D-Wave processors,” said Dr. Andrew King, principal investigator for this work at D-Wave. “Tying the magnet up into a topological knot and watching it escape has given us the first detailed look at dynamics that are normally too fast to observe. What we see is a huge benefit in absolute terms, with the scaling advantage in temperature and size that we would hope for. This simulation is a real problem that scientists have already attacked using the algorithms we compared against, marking a significant milestone and an important foundation for future development. This wouldn’t have been possible today without D-Wave’s lower noise processor.”

“The search for quantum advantage in computations is becoming increasingly lively because there are special problems where genuine progress is being made. These problems may appear somewhat contrived even to physicists, but in this paper from a collaboration between D-Wave Systems, Google, and Simon Fraser University [SFU], it appears that there is an advantage for quantum annealing using a special purpose processor over classical simulations for the more ‘practical’ problem of finding the equilibrium state of a particular quantum magnet,” said Prof. Dr. Gabriel Aeppli, professor of physics at ETH Zürich and EPF Lausanne, and head of the Photon Science Division of the Paul Scherrer Institute. “This comes as a surprise given the belief of many that quantum annealing has no intrinsic advantage over path integral Monte Carlo programs implemented on classical processors.”

“Nascent quantum technologies mature into practical tools only when they leave classical counterparts in the dust in solving real-world problems,” said Hidetoshi Nishimori, Professor, Institute of Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology. “A key step in this direction has been achieved in this paper by providing clear evidence of a scaling advantage of the quantum annealer over an impregnable classical computing competitor in simulating dynamical properties of a complex material. I send sincere applause to the team.”

“Successfully demonstrating such complex phenomena is, on its own, further proof of the programmability and flexibility of D-Wave’s quantum computer,” said D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz. “But perhaps even more important is the fact that this was not demonstrated on a synthetic or ‘trick’ problem. This was achieved on a real problem in physics against an industry-standard tool for simulation–a demonstration of the practical value of the D-Wave processor. We must always be doing two things: furthering the science and increasing the performance of our systems and technologies to help customers develop applications with real-world business value. This kind of scientific breakthrough from our team is in line with that mission and speaks to the emerging value that it’s possible to derive from quantum computing today.”

The scientific achievements presented in Nature Communications further underpin D-Wave’s ongoing work with world-class customers to develop over 250 early quantum computing applications, with a number piloting in production applications, in diverse industries such as manufacturing, logistics, pharmaceutical, life sciences, retail and financial services. In September 2020, D-Wave brought its next-generation Advantage™ quantum system to market via the Leap™ quantum cloud service. The system includes more than 5,000 qubits and 15-way qubit connectivity, as well as an expanded hybrid solver service capable of running business problems with up to one million variables. The combination of Advantage’s computing power and scale with the hybrid solver service gives businesses the ability to run performant, real-world quantum applications for the first time.

That last paragraph seems more sales pitch than research oriented. It’s not unexpected in a company’s press release but I was surprised that the editors at EurekAlert didn’t remove it.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the latest paper,

Scaling advantage over path-integral Monte Carlo in quantum simulation of geometrically frustrated magnets by Andrew D. King, Jack Raymond, Trevor Lanting, Sergei V. Isakov, Masoud Mohseni, Gabriel Poulin-Lamarre, Sara Ejtemaee, William Bernoudy, Isil Ozfidan, Anatoly Yu. Smirnov, Mauricio Reis, Fabio Altomare, Michael Babcock, Catia Baron, Andrew J. Berkley, Kelly Boothby, Paul I. Bunyk, Holly Christiani, Colin Enderud, Bram Evert, Richard Harris, Emile Hoskinson, Shuiyuan Huang, Kais Jooya, Ali Khodabandelou, Nicolas Ladizinsky, Ryan Li, P. Aaron Lott, Allison J. R. MacDonald, Danica Marsden, Gaelen Marsden, Teresa Medina, Reza Molavi, Richard Neufeld, Mana Norouzpour, Travis Oh, Igor Pavlov, Ilya Perminov, Thomas Prescott, Chris Rich, Yuki Sato, Benjamin Sheldan, George Sterling, Loren J. Swenson, Nicholas Tsai, Mark H. Volkmann, Jed D. Whittaker, Warren Wilkinson, Jason Yao, Hartmut Neven, Jeremy P. Hilton, Eric Ladizinsky, Mark W. Johnson, Mohammad H. Amin. Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 1113 (2021) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-20901-5 Published: 18 February 2021

This paper is open access.

Quantum annealing and more

Dr. Andrew King, one of the D-Wave researchers, has written a February 18, 2021 article on Medium explaining some of the work. I’ve excerpted one of King’s points,

…

Insight #1: We observed what actually goes on under the hood in the processor for the first time

Quantum annealing — the approach adopted by D-Wave from the beginning — involves setting up a simple but purely quantum initial state, and gradually reducing the “quantumness” until the system is purely classical. This takes on the order of a microsecond. If you do it right, the classical system represents a hard (NP-complete) computational problem, and the state has evolved to an optimal, or at least near-optimal, solution to that problem.

What happens at the beginning and end of the computation are about as simple as quantum computing gets. But the action in the middle is hard to get a handle on, both theoretically and experimentally. That’s one reason these experiments are so important: they provide high-fidelity measurements of the physical processes at the core of quantum annealing. Our 2018 Nature article introduced the same simulation, but without measuring computation time. To benchmark the experiment this time around, we needed lower-noise hardware (in this case, we used the D-Wave 2000Q lower noise quantum computer), and we needed, strangely, to slow the simulation down. Since the quantum simulation happens so fast, we actually had to make things harder. And we had to find a way to slow down both quantum and classical simulation in an equitable way. The solution? Topological obstruction.

…

If you have time and the inclination, I encourage you to read King’s piece.

D-Wave’s new Advantage quantum computer

Leave a reply

Thanks to Bob Yirka’s September 30, 2020 article for phys.org there’s an announcement about D-Wave Systems’ latest quantum computer and an explanation of how D-Wave’s quantum computer differs from other quantum computers. Here’s the explanation (Note: Links have been removed),

…

Over the past several years, several companies have dedicated resources to the development of a true quantum computer that can tackle problems conventional computers cannot handle. Progress on developing such computers has been slow, however, especially when compared with the early development of the conventional computer. As part of the research effort, companies have taken different approaches. Google and IBM, for example, are working on gate-model quantum computer technology, in which qubits are modified as an algorithm is executed. D-Wave, in sharp contrast, has been focused on developing so-called annealer technology, in which qubits are cooled during execution of an algorithm, which allows for passively changing their value.

Comparing the two is next to impossible because of their functional differences. Thus, using 5,000 qubits in the Advantage system does not necessarily mean that it is any more useful than the 100-qubit systems currently being tested by IBM or Google. Still, the announcement suggests that businesses are ready to start taking advantage of the increased capabilities of quantum systems. D-Wave notes that several customers are already using their system for a wide range of applications. Menten AI, for example, has used the system to design new proteins; grocery chain Save-On-Foods has been using it to optimize business operations; Accenture has been using it to develop business applications; Volkswagen has used the system to develop a more efficient car painting system.

…

Here’s the company’s Sept. 29, 2020 video announcement,

For those who might like some text, there’s a Sept. 29, 2020 D-Wave Systems press release (Note: Links have been removed; this is long),

D-Wave Systems Inc., the leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services, today [Sept. 29, 2020] announced the general availability of its next-generation quantum computing platform, incorporating new hardware, software, and tools to enable and accelerate the delivery of in-production quantum computing applications. Available today in the Leap™ quantum cloud service, the platform includes the Advantage™ quantum system, with more than 5000 qubits and 15-way qubit connectivity, in addition to an expanded hybrid solver service that can run problems with up to one million variables. The combination of the computing power of Advantage and the scale to address real-world problems with the hybrid solver service in Leap enables businesses to run performant, real-time, hybrid quantum applications for the first time.

As part of its commitment to enabling businesses to build in-production quantum applications, the company announced D-Wave Launch™, a jump-start program for businesses who want to get started building hybrid quantum applications today but may need additional support. Bringing together a team of applications experts and a robust partner community, the D-Wave Launch program provides support to help identify the best applications and to translate businesses’ problems into hybrid quantum applications. The extra support helps customers accelerate designing, building, and running their most important and complex applications, while delivering quantum acceleration and performance.

The company also announced a new hybrid solver. The discrete quadratic model (DQM) solver gives developers and businesses the ability to apply the benefits of hybrid quantum computing to new problem classes. Instead of accepting problems with only binary variables (0 or 1), the DQM solver uses other variable sets (e.g. integers from 1 to 500, or red, yellow, and blue), expanding the types of problems that can run on the quantum computer. The DQM solver will be generally available on October 8 [2020].

With support for new solvers and larger problem sizes backed by the Advantage system, customers and partners like Menten AI, Save-On-Foods, Accenture, and Volkswagen are building and running hybrid quantum applications that create solutions with business value today.

  • Protein design pioneer Menten AI has developed the first process using hybrid quantum programs to determine protein structure for de novo protein design with very encouraging results often outperforming classical solvers. Menten AI’s unique protein designs have been computationally validated, chemically synthesized, and are being advanced to live-virus testing against COVID-19.
  • Western Canadian grocery retailer Save-On-Foods is using hybrid quantum algorithms to bring grocery optimization solutions to their business, with pilot tests underway in-store. The company has been able to reduce the time an important optimization task takes from 25 hours to a mere 2 minutes of calculations each week. Even more important than the reduction in time is the ability to optimize performance across and between a significant number of business parameters in a way that is challenging using traditional methods.
  • Accenture, a leading global professional services company, is exploring quantum, quantum-inspired, and hybrid solutions to develop applications across industries. Accenture recently conducted a series of business experiments with a banking client to pilot quantum applications for currency arbitrage, credit scoring, and trading optimization, successfully mapping computationally challenging business problems to quantum formulations, enabling quantum readiness.
  • Volkswagen, an early adopter of D-Wave’s annealing quantum computer, has expanded its quantum use cases with the hybrid solver service to build a paint shop scheduling application. The algorithm is designed to optimize the order in which cars are being painted. By using the hybrid solver service, the number of color switches will be reduced significantly, leading to performance improvements.

The Advantage quantum computer and the Leap quantum cloud service include:

  • New Topology: The topology in Advantage makes it the most connected of any commercial quantum system in the world. In the D-Wave 2000Q™ system, qubits may connect to 6 other qubits. In the new Advantage system, each qubit may connect to 15 other qubits. With two-and-a-half times more connectivity, Advantage enables the embedding of larger problems with fewer physical qubits compared to using the D-Wave 2000Q system. The D-Wave Ocean™ software development kit (SDK) includes tools for using the new topology. Information on the topology in Advantage can be found in this white paper, and a getting started video on how to use the new topology can be found here.
  • Increased Qubit Count: With more than 5000 qubits, Advantage more than doubles the qubit count of the D-Wave 2000Q system. More qubits and richer connectivity provide quantum programmers access to a larger, denser, and more powerful graph for building commercial quantum applications.
  • Greater Performance & Problem Size: With up to one million variables, the hybrid solver service in Leap allows businesses to run large-scale, business-critical problems. This, coupled with the new topology and more than 5000 qubits in the Advantage system, expands the complexity and more than doubles the size of problems that can run directly on the quantum processing unit (QPU). In fact, the hybrid solver outperformed or matched the best of 27 classical optimization solvers on 87% of 45 application-relevant inputs tested in MQLib. Additionally, greater connectivity of the QPU allows for more compact embeddings of complex problems. Advantage can find optimal solutions 10 to 30 times faster in some cases, and can find better quality solutions up to 64% percent of the time, when compared to the D-Wave 2000Q LN QPU.
  • Expansion of Hybrid Software & Tools in Leap: Further investments in the hybrid solver service, new solver classes, ease-of-use, automation, and new tools provide an even more powerful hybrid rapid development environment in Python for business-scale problems.
  • Flexible Access: Advantage, the expanded hybrid solver service, and the upcoming DQM solver are available in the Leap quantum cloud service. All current Leap customers get immediate access with no additional charge, and new customers will benefit from all the new and existing capabilities in Leap. This means that developers and businesses can get started today building in-production hybrid quantum applications. Flexible purchase plans allow developers and forward-thinking businesses to access the D-Wave quantum system in the way that works for them and their business. 
  • Ongoing Releases: D-Wave continues to bring innovations to market with additional hybrid solvers, QPUs, and software updates through the cloud. Interested users and customers can get started today with Advantage and the hybrid solver service, and will benefit from new components of the platform through Leap as they become available.

“Today’s general availability of Advantage delivers the first quantum system built specifically for business, and marks the expansion into production scale commercial applications and new problem types with our hybrid solver services. In combination with our new jump-start program to get customers started, this launch continues what we’ve known at D-Wave for a long time: it’s not about hype, it’s about scaling, and delivering systems that provide real business value on real business applications,” said Alan Baratz, CEO, D-Wave. “We also continue to invest in the science of building quantum systems. Advantage was completely re-engineered from the ground up. We’ll take what we’ve learned about connectivity and scale and continue to push the limits of innovation for the next generations of our quantum computers. I’m incredibly proud of the team that has brought us here and the customers and partners who have collaborated with us to build hundreds of early applications and who now are putting applications into production.”

“We are using quantum to design proteins today. Using hybrid quantum applications, we’re able to solve astronomical protein design problems that help us create new protein structures,” said Hans Melo, Co-founder and CEO, Menten AI. “We’ve seen extremely encouraging results with hybrid quantum procedures often finding better solutions than competing classical solvers for de novo protein design. This means we can create better proteins and ultimately enable new drug discoveries.”

“At Save-On-Foods, we have been committed to bringing innovation to our customers for more than 105 years. To that end, we are always looking for new and creative ways to solve problems, especially in an environment that has gotten increasingly complex,” said Andrew Donaher, Vice President, Digital & Analytics at Save-On-Foods. “We’re new to quantum computing, and in a short period of time, we have seen excellent early results. In fact, the early results we see with Advantage and the hybrid solver service from D-Wave are encouraging enough that our goal is to turn our pilot into an in-production business application. Quantum is emerging as a potential competitive edge for our business.“

“Accenture is committed to helping our clients prepare for the arrival of mainstream quantum computing by exploring relevant use cases and conducting business experiments now,” said Marc Carrel-Billiard, Senior Managing Director and Technology Innovation Lead at Accenture. “We’ve been collaborating with D-Wave for several years and with early access to the Advantage system and hybrid solver service we’ve seen performance improvements and advancements in the platform that are important steps for helping to make quantum a reality for clients across industries, creating new sources of competitive advantage.”

“Embracing quantum computing is nothing new for Volkswagen. We were the first to run a hybrid quantum application in production in Lisbon last November with our bus routing application,” said Florian Neukart, Director of Advanced Technologies at Volkswagen Group of America. “At Volkswagen, we are focusing on building up a deep understanding of meaningful applications of quantum computing in a corporate context. The D-Wave system gives us the opportunity to address optimization tasks with a large number of variables at an impressive speed. With this we are taking a step further towards quantum applications that will be suitable for everyday business use.”

I found the description of D-Wave’s customers and how they’re using quantum computing to be quite interesting. For anyone curious about D-Wave Systems, you can find out more here. BTW, the company is located in metro Vancouver (Canada).

Live music by teleportation? Catch up. It’s already happened.

Leave a reply

Dr. Alexis Kirke first graced this blog about four years ago, in a July 8, 2016 posting titled, Cornwall (UK) connects with University of Southern California for performance by a quantum computer (D-Wave) and mezzo soprano Juliette Pochin.

Kirke now returns with a study showing how teleportation helped to create a live performance piece, from a July 2, 2020 news item on ScienceDaily,

Teleportation is most commonly the stuff of science fiction and, for many, would conjure up the immortal phrase “Beam me up, Scotty.”

However, a new study has described how its status in science fact could actually be employed as another, and perhaps unlikely, form of entertainment — live music.

Dr Alexis Kirke, Senior Research Fellow in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research at the University of Plymouth (UK), has for the first time shown that a human musician can communicate directly with a quantum computer via teleportation.

The result is a high-tech jamming session, through which a blend of live human and computer-generated sounds come together to create a unique performance piece.

A July 2, 2020 Plymouth University press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, offers more detail about this latest work along with some information about the 2016 performance and how it all provides insight into how quantum computing might function in the future,

Speaking about the study, published in the current issue of the Journal of New Music Research, Dr Kirke said: “The world is racing to build the first practical and powerful quantum computers, and whoever succeeds first will have a scientific and military advantage because of the extreme computing power of these machines. This research shows for the first time that this much-vaunted advantage can also be helpful in the world of making and performing music. No other work has shown this previously in the arts, and it demonstrates that quantum power is something everyone can appreciate and enjoy.”

Quantum teleportation is the ability to instantaneously transmit quantum information over vast distances, with scientists having previously used it to send information from Earth to an orbiting satellite over 870 miles away.

In the current study, Dr Kirke describes how he used a system called MIq (Multi-Agent Interactive qgMuse), in which an IBM quantum computer executes a methodology called Grover’s Algorithm.

Discovered by Lov Grover at Bell Labs in 1996, it was the second main quantum algorithm (after Shor’s algorithm) and gave a huge advantage over traditional computing.

In this instance, it allows the dynamic solving of musical logical rules which, for example, could prevent dissonance or keep to ¾ instead of common time.

It is significantly faster than any classical computer algorithm, and Dr Kirke said that speed was essential because there is actually no way to transmit quantum information other than through teleportation.

The result was that when played the theme from Game of Thrones on the piano, the computer – a 14-qubit machine housed at IBM in Melbourne – rapidly generated accompanying music that was transmitted back in response.

Dr Kirke, who in 2016 staged the first ever duet between a live singer and a quantum supercomputer, said: “At the moment there are limits to how complex a real-time computer jamming system can be. The number of musical rules that a human improviser knows intuitively would simply take a computer too long to solve to real-time music. Shortcuts have been invented to speed up this process in rule-based AI music, but using the quantum computer speed-up has not be tried before. So while teleportation cannot move information faster than the speed of light, if remote collaborators want to connect up their quantum computers – which they are using to increase the speed of their musical AIs – it is 100% necessary. Quantum information simply cannot be transmitted using normal digital transmission systems.”

Caption: Dr Alexis Kirke (right) and soprano Juliette Pochin during the first duet between a live singer and a quantum supercomputer. Credit: University of Plymouth

Here’s a link to and a citation for the latest research,

Testing a hybrid hardware quantum multi-agent system architecture that utilizes the quantum speed advantage for interactive computer music by Alexis Kirke. Journal of New Music Research Volume 49, 2020 – Issue 3 Pages 209-230 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2020.1749672 Published online: 13 Apr 2020

This paper appears to be open access.

Fourth Industrial Revolution and its impact on charity organizations

Leave a reply

Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf’s February 21, 2020 article (Technology and innovation: How the Fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting the charitable sector) for Charity Village has an ebullient approach to adoption of new and emerging technologies in the charitable sector (Note: A link has been removed),

…

Almost daily, new technologies are being developed to help innovate the way people give or the way organizations offer opportunities to advance their causes. There is no going back.

The charitable sector – along with society at large – is now fully in the midst of what is being called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a term first brought to prominence among CEOs, thought leaders and policy makers at the 2016 World Economic Forum. And if you haven’t heard the phrase yet, get ready to hear it tons more as economies around the world embrace it.

To be clear, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the newest disruption in the way our world works. When you hear someone talk about it, what they’re describing is the massive technological shift in our business and personal ecosystems that now rely heavily on things like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, 3D printing and the general “Internet of things.”

…

Still, now more than ever, charitable business is getting done and being advanced by sector pioneers who aren’t afraid to make use of new technologies on offer to help civil society.

…

It seems like everywhere one turns, the topic of artificial intelligence (A.I.) is increasingly becoming subject of choice.

This is no different in the charitable sector, and particularly so for a new company called Fundraise Wisely (aka Wisely). Its co-founder and CEO, Artiom Komarov, explains a bit about what exactly his tech is doing for the sector.

“We help accelerate fundraising, with A.I. At a product level, we connect to your CRM (content relationship management system) and predict the next gift and next gift date for every donor. We then use that information to help you populate and prioritize donor portfolios,” Komarov states.

He notes that his company is seeing increased demand for innovative technologies from charities over the last while.

“What we’re hearing is that… A.I. tech is compelling because at the end of the day it’s meant to move the bottom line, helping nonprofits grow their revenue. We’ve also found that internally [at a charitable organization] there’s always a champion that sees the potential impact of technology; and that’s a great place to start with change,” Komarov says. “If it’s done right, tech can be an enabler of better work for organizations. From both research and experience, we know that tech adoption usually fails because of culture rather than the underlying technology. We’re here to work with the client closely to help that transition.”

…

I would like to have seen some numbers. For example, Komarov says that AI is having a positive impact on a charity’s bottom line. So, how much money did one of these charities raise? Was it more money than they would have made without AI? Assuming they did manage to raise greater funds, could another technology been more cost effective?

For another perspective (equally positive) on technology and charity, there’s a November 29, 2012 posting (Why technology and innovation are key to increasing charity donations) on the Guardian blogs by Henna Butt and Renita Shah (Note: Links have been removed),

At the beginning of this year the [UK] Cabinet Office and Nesta [formerly National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts {NESTA}] announced a £10m fund to invest in innovation in giving. The first tranche of this money has already been invested in promising initiatives such as Timto which allows you to create a gift list that includes a charity donation and Pennies, whose electronic money box allows customers to donate when paying for something in a shop using a credit card. Small and sizeable organisations alike are now using web and mobile technologies to make giving more convenient, more social and more compelling.

…

Butt’s and Shah’s focus was on mobile technologies and social networks. Like Levy-Ajzenkopf’s article, there’s no discussion of any possible downside to these technologies, e.g., privacy issues. As well, the inevitability of this move toward more technology for charity is explicitly stated by Levy-Ajzenkopf “There is no going back” and noted less starkly by Butt and Shah “… innovation is becoming increasingly important for the success of charities.” To rephrase my concern, are we utilizing technology in our work or are we serving the needs of our technology?

Finally, for anyone who’s curious about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, I have a December 3, 2015 posting about it.

Cryonaut LEGO ®, quantum computing, and Season’s Greetings for 2019!

Leave a reply

Caption: For the first time, LEGO ® has been cooled to the lowest temperature possible in an experiment which reveals a new use for the popular toy. Credit: Josh Chawner

Pretty interesting science and seasonally appropriate for large numbers of people, this video was posted on December 23, 2019 (from YouTube’s The World’s Coolest LEGO Set! webpage),

Hamster Productions 154K subscribers Our LEGO insulator paper: https://nature.com/articles/s41598-01… A world leading team of ultra-low temperature physicists at Lancaster University decided to place a LEGO figure and four LEGO blocks inside their record-breaking dilution refrigerator. This machine – specially made at the University – is the most effective refrigerator in the world, capable of reaching 1.6 millidegrees above absolute zero (minus 273.15 Centigrade), which is about 200,000 times colder than room temperature and 2,000 times colder than deep space. This research was lead by Low Temperature Physicist Dr. Dmitry Zmeev https://twitter.com/dmitry_zmeev ——————————- TRANSLATORS: Chinese (Traditional) – Hsin Hui Chang Russian – Dmitry Zmeev Dutch – Ruben Leenders Spanish – Marta San Juan Mucientes Italian – Leonardo Forcieri Polish – Veronica Letka ——————————– …

From a December 23, 2019 news item on ScienceDaily,

For the first time, LEGO ® has been cooled to the lowest temperature possible in an experiment which reveals a new use for the popular toy.

Its special properties mean it could be useful in the development of quantum computing.

A world leading team of ultra-low temperature physicists at Lancaster University decided to place a LEGO ® figure and four LEGO ® blocks inside their record-breaking dilution refrigerator.

This machine — specially made at the University — is the most effective refrigerator in the world, capable of reaching 1.6 millidegrees above absolute zero (minus 273.15 Centigrade), which is about 200,000 times colder than room temperature and 2,000 times colder than deep space.

The results — published in the journal Scientific Reports — were surprising.

…

A December 23, 2019 Lancaster University press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

Dr Dmitry Zmeev, who led the research team, said: “”Our results are significant because we found that the clamping arrangement between the LEGO ® blocks causes the LEGO ® structures to behave as an extremely good thermal insulator at cryogenic temperatures.

“This is very desirable for construction materials used for the design of future scientific equipment like dilution refrigerators.”

Invented 50 years ago, the dilution refrigerator is at the centre of a global multi-billion dollar industry and is crucial to the work of modern experimental physics and engineering, including the development of quantum computers.

The use of ABS plastic structures, such as LEGO ®, instead of the solid materials currently in use, means that any future thermal insulator could be produced at a significantly reduced cost.

Researchers say the next step is to design and 3D print a new thermal insulator for the next generation of dilution refrigerators.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

LEGO® Block Structures as a Sub-Kelvin Thermal Insulator by J. M. A. Chawner, A. T. Jones, M. T. Noble, G. R. Pickett, V. Tsepelin & D. E. Zmeev. Scientific Reports volume 9, Article number: 19642 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41598-019-55616-7 Published 23 December 2019

This paper is open access.

Finally, Joyeux Noël et Bonne année 2020!

‘Superconductivity: The Musical!’ wins the 2018 Dance Your Ph.D. competition

Leave a reply

I can’t believe that October 24, 2011 was the last time the Dance Your Ph.D. competition was featured here. Time flies, eh? Here’s the 2018 contest winner’s submission, Superconductivity: The Musical!, (Note: This video is over 11 mins. long),

A February 17, 2019 CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) news item introduces the video’s writer, producer,s musician, and scientist,

Swing dancing. Songwriting. And theoretical condensed matter physics.

It’s a unique person who can master all three, but a University of Alberta PhD student has done all that and taken it one step further by making a rollicking music video about his academic pursuits — and winning an international competition for his efforts.

Pramodh Senarath Yapa is the winner of the 2018 Dance Your PhD contest, which challenges scientists around the world to explain their research through a jargon-free medium: dance.

The prize is $1,000 and “immortal geek fame.”

Yapa’s video features his friends twirling, swinging and touch-stepping their way through an explanation of his graduate research, called “Non-Local Electrodynamics of Superconducting Wires: Implications for Flux Noise and Inductance.”

…

Jennifer Ouelette’s February 17, 2019 posting for the ars Technica blog offers more detail (Note: A link has been removed),

Yapa’s research deals with how matter behaves when it’s cooled to very low temperatures, when quantum effects kick in—such as certain metals becoming superconductive, or capable of conducting electricity with zero resistance. That’s useful for any number of practical applications. D-Wave Systems [a company located in metro Vancouver {Canada}], for example, is building quantum computers using loops of superconducting wire. For his thesis, “I had to use the theory of superconductivity to figure out how to build a better quantum computer,” said Yapa.

Condensed matter theory (the precise description of Yapa’s field of research) is a notoriously tricky subfield to make palatable for a non-expert audience. “There isn’t one unifying theory or a single tool that we use,” he said. “Condensed matter theorists study a million different things using a million different techniques.”

His conceptual breakthrough came about when he realized electrons were a bit like “unsociable people” who find joy when they pair up with other electrons. “You can imagine electrons as a free gas, which means they don’t interact with each other,” he said. “The theory of superconductivity says they actually form pairs when cooled below a certain temperature. That was the ‘Eureka!’ moment, when I realized I could totally use swing dancing.”

John Bohannon’s Feb. 15, 2019 article for Science (magazine) offers an update on Yapa’s research interests (it seems that Yapa was dancing his Masters degree) and more information about the contest itself ,

..

“I remember hearing about Dance Your Ph.D. many years ago and being amazed at all the entries,” Yapa says. “This is definitely a longtime dream come true.” His research, meanwhile, has evolved from superconductivity—which he pursued at the University of Victoria in Canada, where he completed a master’s degree—to the physics of superfluids, the focus of his Ph.D. research at the University of Alberta.

This is the 11th year of Dance Your Ph.D. hosted by Science and AAAS. The contest challenges scientists around the world to explain their research through the most jargon-free medium available: interpretive dance.

“Most people would not normally think of interpretive dance as a tool for scientific communication,” says artist Alexa Meade, one of the judges of the contest. “However, the body can express conceptual thoughts through movement in ways that words and data tables cannot. The results are both artfully poetic and scientifically profound.”

…

Getting back to the February 17, 2019 CBC news item,

…

Yapa describes his video, filmed in Victoria where he earned his master’s degree, as a “three act, mini-musical.”

“I envisioned it as talking about the social lives of electrons,” he said. “The electrons starts out in a normal metal, at normal temperatures….We say these electrons are non-interacting. They don’t talk to each other. Electrons ignore each other and are very unsociable.”

The electrons — represented by dancers wearing saddle oxfords, poodle skirts, vests and suspenders — shuffle up the dance floor by themselves.

In the second act, the metal is cooled.

“The electrons become very unhappy about being alone. They want to find a partner, some companionship for the cold times,” he said

That’s when the electrons join up into something called Cooper pairs.

The dancers join together, moving to lyrics like, “If we peek/the Coopers are cheek-to-cheek.

In the final act, Yapa gets his dancers to demonstrate what happens when the Cooper pairs meet the impurities of the materials they’re moving in. All of a sudden, a group of black-leather-clad thugs move onto the dance floor.

“The Cooper pairs come dancing near these impurities and they’re like these crotchety old people yelling and shaking their fists at these young dancers,” Yapa explained.

Yapa’s entry to the annual contest swept past 49 other contestants to earn him the win. The competition is sponsored by Science magazine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

…

Congratulations to Pramodh Senarath Yapa.

D-Wave and the first large-scale quantum simulation of a* topological state of matter

Leave a reply

This is all about a local (Burnaby is one of the metro Vancouver municipalities) quantum computing companies, D-Wave Systems. The company has been featured here from time to time. It’s usually about about their quantum technology (they are considered a technology star in local and [I think] other circles) but my March 9, 2018 posting about the SXSW (South by Southwest) festival noted that Bo Ewald, President, D-Wave Systems US, was a member of the ‘Quantum Computing: Science Fiction to Science Fact’ panel.

Now, they’re back making technology announcements like this August 22, 2018 news item on phys.org (Note: Links have been removed),

D-Wave Systems today [August 22, 2018] published a milestone study demonstrating a topological phase transition using its 2048-qubit annealing quantum computer. This complex quantum simulation of materials is a major step toward reducing the need for time-consuming and expensive physical research and development.

The paper, entitled “Observation of topological phenomena in a programmable lattice of 1,800 qubits”, was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature. This work marks an important advancement in the field and demonstrates again that the fully programmable D-Wave quantum computer can be used as an accurate simulator of quantum systems at a large scale. The methods used in this work could have broad implications in the development of novel materials, realizing Richard Feynman’s original vision of a quantum simulator. This new research comes on the heels of D-Wave’s recent Science paper demonstrating a different type of phase transition in a quantum spin-glass simulation. The two papers together signify the flexibility and versatility of the D-Wave quantum computer in quantum simulation of materials, in addition to other tasks such as optimization and machine learning.

An August 22, 2108 D-Wave Systems news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, delves further (Note: A link has been removed),

In the early 1970s, theoretical physicists Vadim Berezinskii, J. Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless predicted a new state of matter characterized by nontrivial topological properties. The work was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2016. D-Wave researchers demonstrated this phenomenon by programming the D-Wave 2000Q™ system to form a two-dimensional frustrated lattice of artificial spins. The observed topological properties in the simulated system cannot exist without quantum effects and closely agree with theoretical predictions.

“This paper represents a breakthrough in the simulation of physical systems which are otherwise essentially impossible,” said 2016 Nobel laureate Dr. J. Michael Kosterlitz. “The test reproduces most of the expected results, which is a remarkable achievement. This gives hope that future quantum simulators will be able to explore more complex and poorly understood systems so that one can trust the simulation results in quantitative detail as a model of a physical system. I look forward to seeing future applications of this simulation method.”

“The work described in the Nature paper represents a landmark in the field of quantum computation: for the first time, a theoretically predicted state of matter was realized in quantum simulation before being demonstrated in a real magnetic material,” said Dr. Mohammad Amin, chief scientist at D-Wave. “This is a significant step toward reaching the goal of quantum simulation, enabling the study of material properties before making them in the lab, a process that today can be very costly and time consuming.”

“Successfully demonstrating physics of Nobel Prize-winning importance on a D-Wave quantum computer is a significant achievement in and of itself. But in combination with D-Wave’s recent quantum simulation work published in Science, this new research demonstrates the flexibility and programmability of our system to tackle recognized, difficult problems in a variety of areas,” said Vern Brownell, D-Wave CEO.

“D-Wave’s quantum simulation of the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition is an exciting and impactful result. It not only contributes to our understanding of important problems in quantum magnetism, but also demonstrates solving a computationally hard problem with a novel and efficient mapping of the spin system, requiring only a limited number of qubits and opening new possibilities for solving a broader range of applications,” said Dr. John Sarrao, principal associate director for science, technology, and engineering at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“The ability to demonstrate two very different quantum simulations, as we reported in Science and Nature, using the same quantum processor, illustrates the programmability and flexibility of D-Wave’s quantum computer,” said Dr. Andrew King, principal investigator for this work at D-Wave. “This programmability and flexibility were two key ingredients in Richard Feynman’s original vision of a quantum simulator and open up the possibility of predicting the behavior of more complex engineered quantum systems in the future.”

The achievements presented in Nature and Science join D-Wave’s continued work with world-class customers and partners on real-world prototype applications (“proto-apps”) across a variety of fields. The 70+ proto-apps developed by customers span optimization, machine learning, quantum material science, cybersecurity, and more. Many of the proto-apps’ results show that D-Wave systems are approaching, and sometimes surpassing, conventional computing in terms of performance or solution quality on real problems, at pre-commercial scale. As the power of D-Wave systems and software expands, these proto-apps point to the potential for scaled customer application advantage on quantum computers.

The company has prepared a video describing Richard Feynman’s proposal about quantum computing and celebrating their latest achievement,

Here’s the company’s Youtube video description,

In 1982, Richard Feynman proposed the idea of simulating the quantum physics of complex systems with a programmable quantum computer. In August 2018, his vision was realized when researchers from D-Wave Systems and the Vector Institute demonstrated the simulation of a topological phase transition—the subject of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics—in a fully programmable D-Wave 2000Q™ annealing quantum computer. This complex quantum simulation of materials is a major step toward reducing the need for time-consuming and expensive physical research and development.

You may want to check out the comments in response to the video.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the Nature paper,

Observation of topological phenomena in a programmable lattice of 1,800 qubits by Andrew D. King, Juan Carrasquilla, Jack Raymond, Isil Ozfidan, Evgeny Andriyash, Andrew Berkley, Mauricio Reis, Trevor Lanting, Richard Harris, Fabio Altomare, Kelly Boothby, Paul I. Bunyk, Colin Enderud, Alexandre Fréchette, Emile Hoskinson, Nicolas Ladizinsky, Travis Oh, Gabriel Poulin-Lamarre, Christopher Rich, Yuki Sato, Anatoly Yu. Smirnov, Loren J. Swenson, Mark H. Volkmann, Jed Whittaker, Jason Yao, Eric Ladizinsky, Mark W. Johnson, Jeremy Hilton, & Mohammad H. Amin. Nature volume 560, pages456–460 (2018) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0410-x Published 22 August 2018

This paper is behind a paywall but, for those who don’t have access, there is a synopsis here.

For anyone curious about the earlier paper published in July 2018, here’s a link and a citation,

Phase transitions in a programmable quantum spin glass simulator by R. Harris, Y. Sato, A. J. Berkley, M. Reis, F. Altomare, M. H. Amin, K. Boothby, P. Bunyk, C. Deng, C. Enderud, S. Huang, E. Hoskinson, M. W. Johnson, E. Ladizinsky, N. Ladizinsky, T. Lanting, R. Li, T. Medina, R. Molavi, R. Neufeld, T. Oh, I. Pavlov, I. Perminov, G. Poulin-Lamarre, C. Rich, A. Smirnov, L. Swenson, N. Tsai, M. Volkmann, J. Whittaker, J. Yao. Science 13 Jul 2018: Vol. 361, Issue 6398, pp. 162-165 DOI: 10.1126/science.aat2025

This paper too is behind a paywall.

You can find out more about D-Wave here.

*ETA ‘a’ to the post title on February 24, 2021.