Q-NEXT collaboration awarded National Quantum Initiative funding
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The University of Wisconsin–Madison solidified its standing as a leader in the field of quantum information science when the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the White House announced the Q-NEXT collaboration as a funded Quantum Information Science Research Center through the National Quantum Initiative Act. The five-year, $115 million collaboration was one of five Centers announced today.
Q-NEXT, a next-generation quantum science and engineering collaboration led by the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, brings together nearly 100 world-class researchers from three national laboratories, 10 universities including UW–Madison, and 10 leading U.S. technology companies to develop the science and technology to control and distribute quantum information.
“The main goals for Q-NEXT are first to deliver quantum interconnects — to find ways to quantum mechanically connect distant objects,” says Mark Eriksson, the John Bardeen Professor of Physics at UW–Madison and a Q-NEXT thrust lead. “And next, to establish a national resource to both develop and provide pristine materials for quantum science and technology.”
New study expands types of physics, engineering problems that can be solved by quantum computers
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A well-known quantum algorithm that is useful in studying and solving problems in quantum physics can be applied to problems in classical physics, according to a new study in the journal Physical Review A from University of Wisconsin–Madison assistant professor of physics Jeff Parker.
Quantum algorithms – a set of calculations that are run on a quantum computer as opposed to a classical computer – used for solving problems in physics have mainly focused on questions in quantum physics. The new applications include a range of problems common to physics and engineering, and expands on the types of questions that can be asked in those fields.
UW–Madison named member of new $25 million Midwest quantum science institute
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As joint members of a Midwest quantum science collaboration, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the University of Chicago have been named partners in a National Science Foundation Quantum Leap Challenge Institute, NSF announced Tuesday.
The five-year, $25 million NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Hybrid Quantum Architectures and Networks (HQAN) was one of three in this first round of NSF Quantum Leap funding and helps establish the region as a major hub of quantum science. HQAN’s principal investigator, Brian DeMarco, is a professor of physics at UIUC. UW–Madison professor of physics Mark Saffman and University of Chicago engineering professor Hannes Bernien are co-principal investigators.
“HQAN is very much a regional institute that will allow us to accelerate in directions in which we’ve already been headed and to start new collaborative projects between departments at UW–Madison as well as between us, the University of Illinois, and the University of Chicago.” says Saffman, who is also director of the Wisconsin Quantum Institute. “These flagship institutes are being established as part of the National Quantum Initiative Act that was funded by Congress, and it is a recognition of the strength of quantum information research at UW–Madison that we are among the first.”
In a hybrid quantum network, hardware for storing and processing quantum information is linked together. This design could be beneficial for applications that rely on distributed quantum computing resources. | Credit: E. Edwards, IQUIST
Chicago Quantum Exchange, including WQI, welcomes seven new partners in tech, computing and finance, to advance research and training
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Scientists in Microsoft Quantum Lab Delft conducting research in pursuit of a topologically protected qubit. Microsoft is one of seven new computing, tech and finance companies to join the Chicago Quantum Exchange | Credit: Microsoft
The Chicago Quantum Exchange, a growing intellectual hub for the research and development of quantum technology that includes the Wisconsin Quantum Institute, has added to its community seven new corporate partners in computing, technology and finance that are working to bring about and primed to take advantage of the coming quantum revolution.
These new industry partners are Intel, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Quantum Design, Qubitekk, Rigetti Computing, and Zurich Instruments.
The Chicago Quantum Exchange and its corporate partners advance the science and engineering necessary to build and scale quantum technologies and develop practical applications. The results of their work – precision data from quantum sensors, advanced quantum computers and their algorithms, and securely transmitted information – will transform today’s leading industries. The addition of these partners brings a total of 13 companies into the Chicago Quantum Exchange to work with scientists and engineers at universities and the national laboratories in the region.
University of Wisconsin–Madison engineers have made it possible to remotely determine the temperature beneath the surface of certain materials using a new technique they call depth thermography. The method may be useful in applications where traditional temperature probes won’t work, like monitoring semiconductor performance or next-generation nuclear reactors.
Many temperature sensors measure thermal radiation, most of which is in the infrared spectrum, coming off the surface of an object. The hotter the object, the more radiation it emits, which is the basis for gadgets like thermal imaging cameras.
Depth thermography, however, goes beyond the surface and works with a certain class of materials that are partially transparent to infrared radiation.
“We can measure the spectrum of thermal radiation emitted from the object and use a sophisticated algorithm to infer the temperature not just on the surface, but also underneath the surface, tens to hundreds of microns in,” says Mikhail Kats, a UW–Madison professor of electrical and computer engineering. “We’re able to do that precisely and accurately, at least in some instances.”
An infrared image of the fused silica window used to test the depth thermography concept. For the project, the team heated the silica, a type of glass, and analyzed it using a spectrometer. They then measured temperature readings from various depths of the sample. IMAGE COURTESY OF MIKHAIL KATS
Eom receives Vannevar Bush faculty fellowship to study new class of thin films
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WQI member and materials science and engineering professor Chang-Beom Eom has received a 2020 Vannevar Bush faculty fellowship from the Department of Defense. He’ll use the $3 million in funding to investigate “a new family of quantum materials.”
Mark Eriksson has been named the John Bardeen Professor of Physics, through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) named professorship program.
The WARF named professorship program provides recognition for distinguished research contributions of the UW–Madison faculty. The awards are intended to honor those faculty who have made major contributions to the advancement of knowledge, primarily through their research endeavors, but also as a result of their teaching and service activities.
To learn more about Eriksson’s research, and why he chose fellow UW–Madison alum John Bardeen as the namesake for his professorship, please read the original story.
WQI researchers part of team awarded DARPA grant to apply quantum computers to real-world problems
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Wisconsin Quantum Institute director Mark Saffman and his research group are part of a team that will attempt to make quantum computing hardware more applicable to real-world problems.
The up to $7.4 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding is through the ONISQ program — Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices. ColdQuanta is the primary recipient of the funding, and Saffman’s group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, along with a national lab and other universities, are partners.
“We’re in this era of development of quantum computing hardware that has been termed NISQ, and that’s because we don’t have error correction running on our quantum hardware,” says Saffman, who is also a UW–Madison professor of physics and chief scientist for quantum information at ColdQuanta. “The question is, can we do anything useful with this? Because the outlook for having a real error-corrected quantum computer that you could run very long calculations still seems to be a long way away, but we have these NISQ machines today, and they’re getting better all the time.”
Mark Saffman
Saffman’s lab specializes in the development of one type of quantum computer known as a neutral atom quantum computer, in which individual atoms can serve as qubits, or quantum bits. The ONISQ program is looking to apply NISQ-era hardware to complex optimization problems that would be too difficult or time-consuming for a classical computer to solve. In this case, Saffman’s group is taking on a combinatorial optimization problem, known as Max-Cut.
“Very briefly, the problem is, if I gave you a graph with a bunch of locations in the graph that are connected by lines, and I wanted to divide the graph into two sets of locations such that there’s the maximum possible number of connections between locations in one group and locations in the other group,” Saffman explains. “It sounds like a totally abstract mathematician’s problem, but it turns out there are all kinds of practical applications, including logistics deployment, self-organized pattern recognition, scheduling problems — it actually comes up in a lot of everyday things.”
The project is divided into two phases, and the team needs to reach benchmarks in phase one, set by DARPA, in order to continue into the second phase. The most important metric, Saffman says, is one that takes into account the number of qubits on the processor (N) and the number of iterations that underlie how the computed algorithm works (P), or N x P.
“We’re going to be solving this Max-Cut problem using something called QAOA, quantum approximate optimization algorithm. The QAOA involves running a sequence of quantum gates, and so the metric for DARPA for phase one is to reach N times P equals 100, and N times P equals 10,000 for phase two,” Saffman says. “No one has specifically demonstrated N times P equals 100 to my knowledge, so it is an advance, but one that is within striking distance.”
Other partners in this grant include Raytheon Technologies, Argonne National Laboratory, University of Chicago, NIST Gaithersburg, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Innsbruck, and Tufts University.
Two students earn 2020 QISE-NET awards
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Two physics graduate students, Xiaoyu Jiang and Abigail Shearrow, have had their projects awarded funding through QISE-NET, the Quantum Information Science and Engineering Network. Run through the University of Chicago, QISE-NET is open to any student pursuing an advanced degree in any field of quantum science. Jiang, Shearrow, and other students in their cohort earn up to three years of support, including funding, mentoring and training at annual workshops. All awardees are paired with a mentoring QISE company or national lab, at which they will complete part of their projects. Jiang and Shearrow explain their projects below.
Xiaoyu Jiang
Xiaoyu Yang, Saffman Group | Mentoring partner: Argonne National Lab
“The research I proposed aims to, with the help of Argonne National Lab’s computational expertise, build a platform that models and simulates the performance of the atomic qubit array (AQuA) experiment in Prof. Saffman’s lab. This could help us to understand the effect of various technical problems, such as laser noise, in the experiment, and guide us in improving the gate fidelities. On the other hand, the platform could also be a useful tool in simulating and designing novel quantum gate protocols and quantum algorithms that can be performed on AQuA.”
Abigail Shearrow
Abigail Shearrow, McDermott Group | Mentoring Partner: Google
“We are developing a new type of superconducting qubit that provides protection from noise and decoherence at the hardware level. Our near-term goals are to prepare quantum superposition states and to transfer them into the protected regime where we will look for extended energy relaxation and dephasing times. We will next implement protected gates, which we will characterize by doing interleaved randomized benchmarking.”
First cohort of students dives into new quantum computing master’s degree
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The inaugural MS in Physics–Quantum Computing is the first program of its kind in the U.S. It addresses an emerging workforce need by preparing students to enter this rapidly growing and highly complex field. Most of the students will complete their degrees August. We checked in with them after their first semester to see how their studies were going.
Interested in earning a Master’s in Quantum Computing? Visit go.wisc.edu/MSPQC for more info.
