Kevin and Sebastian are joined by Dr. Vladan Vuletic, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics at the Center for Ultracold Atoms and Research in the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

At the end of 2023, the quantum computing community was startled and amazed by the results from a bombshell paper published in Nature on December 6th, titled Logical quantum processor based on reconfigurable atom arrays  in which Dr. Vuletic's group collaborated with Dr Mikhail Lukin's group at Harvard to create 48 logical qubits from an array of 280 atoms. Scott Aaronson does a good job of breaking down the results on his blog, but the upshot is that this is the largest number of logical qubits created, and a very large leap ahead for the field. 

00:00 Introduction and Background
01:07 Path to Quantum Computing
03:30 Rydberg Atoms and Quantum Gates
08:56 Transversal Gates and Logical Qubits
15:12 Implementation and Commercial Potential
23:59 Future Outlook and Quantum Simulations
30:51 Scaling and Applications
32:22 Improving Quantum Gate Fidelity
33:19 Advancing Field of View Systems
33:48 Closing the Feedback Loop on Error Correction
35:29 Quantum Error Correction as a Remarkable Breakthrough
36:13 Cross-Fertilization of Quantum Error Correction Ideas

Summary

In this episode, Sebastian and Kevin are joined by Chiara Decaroli, a quantum physicist and venture capitalist. Chiara shares her unique journey into the field of quantum, starting from a small village in Italy to earning her PhD in quantum physics. She explains the history of ion trapping and how it led to the development of quantum computing. Chiara also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of trapped ion systems and the challenges of investing in early-stage quantum startups. In this conversation, Chiara Decaroli discusses the challenges of assessing quantum technologies and the deep expertise required in the field. She also shares her experience in gaining familiarity with different quantum modalities and the importance of multidisciplinarity in the quantum field. Chiara highlights the skills needed in the quantum industry, emphasizing the need for deep knowledge in physics and specialized segments. She also discusses the importance of cross-disciplinary education and the potential impact of quantum technologies.

Takeaways

Chiara's path to quantum started from a small village in Italy and led her to earn a PhD in quantum physics at ETH Zurich.
Ion trapping is a key technology in quantum computing, and it has a rich history dating back to the 1930s.
Trapped ions can be manipulated using laser beams to perform single and two-qubit gates.
Trapped ion systems have the advantage of perfect qubits but face challenges in scalability and speed of operations.
Investing in quantum startups requires a deep understanding of the field and the ability to navigate the early-stage landscape. Assessing quantum technologies requires deep expertise and a scientific background.
Gaining familiarity with different quantum modalities requires extensive reading and talking to experts in the field.
The quantum field is highly multidisciplinary, requiring expertise in physics, engineering, software development, and specialized domains.
Cross-disciplinary education is important in the quantum field to foster innovation and solve complex problems.
The potential impact of quantum technologies is immense, but it is challenging to predict the exact applications and advancements.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background
01:01 Chiara's Path to Quantum
08:13 History of Ion Trapping
19:47 Implementing Gates with Trapped Ions
27:24 Strengths and Weaknesses of Trapped Ion Systems
35:49 Venture Capital in Quantum
37:55 The Challenges of Assessing Quantum Technologies
39:12 Gaining Familiarity with Different Quantum Modalities
40:27 The Multidisciplinary Nature of Quantum Technologies
41:22 Skills Needed in the Quantum Field
42:58 The Importance of Cross-Disciplinary Education
44:27 The Potential Impact of Quantum Technologies

In this episode of The New Quantum Era, Kevin Rowney and Sebastian Hassinger are joined by Dr. Ieva Čepaitė to delve into the nuanced world of quantum physics and computation. Dr. Čepaitė discusses her journey into quantum computing and her work on counterdiabatic methods used to optimize the control of many body quantum states. She provides an overview of the landscape of new algorithms available within the field. She points out the importance of understanding the hardware to implement a quantum algorithm effectively. The focus then shifts to a discussion on adiabatic and counterdiabatic systems, providing a detailed understanding of both methods. The conversation concludes with a speculative take on future breakthroughs that could emerge with respect to quantum algorithms.

00:31 Introduction and Overview of the Interview
02:43 Dr. Čepaitė's Journey into Quantum Computing
05:23 Dr. Čepaitė's Diverse Experience in Quantum Computing
09:37 The Challenges and Opportunities in Quantum Computing
11:50 Understanding Adiabatic and Counterdiabatic Systems
15:15 The Potential of Counterdiabatic Techniques in Quantum Computing
25:49 The Future of Quantum Algorithms
32:55 The Role of Quantum Machine Learning
35:48 Closing Remarks and Reflections

In this interview, independent quantum information science researcher and consultant, Dr. Cassandra Grenade, shares their journey from triple majoring in physics, math, and computer science to their current consulting work with their firm, Dual Space Solutions. She discusses the concept behind the Quantum Intermediate Representation project (QIR), a tool which represents quantum programs and allows language designers to work independently of specific quantum processor details. Cassandra explains how QIR can solve the 'N to M' problem, where multiple language designs must interface with multiple quantum hardware architectures, thereby preventing the need for creating numerous unique compilers. Further, she dives into the evolution and future of quantum computing, highlighting the need for an industry-wide shift in understanding a quantum computer as more than just a circuit-based entity.

00:02 Introduction and Guest Background
00:22 Cassandra's Journey into Quantum Computing
01:40 The Birth of Dual Space Solutions
05:35 The Importance of Interdisciplinary Approach in Quantum Computing
08:14 The Challenges and Solutions in Quantum Computing
10:42 The Role of Quantum Intermediate Representation (QIR)
15:56 The Impact of QIR on Quantum Computing
19:01 The Future of Quantum Computing with QIR

Misty Wahl of the Unitary Fund joins us for this episode to talk about quantum error mitigation strategies like zero noise extrapolation (ZNE) and probabilistic error reduction using the Mitiq open source framework. Misty is a lead contributor the the Mitiq project as well as an author on a number of recent papers on the topic. We'll discuss the current state of the art, potential future strategies that leverage machine learning and quantum error correction, and how the Mitiq framework makes it easier to code up and compare mitigation strategies on a wide variety of qubits and SDKs.

You can find a sampling of Misty's reasearch papers and talk on her personal website, mistywahl.com

• Error mitigation in quantum computing with Misty Wall. 0:02
  • Misty Wahl, technical staff at Unitary Fund, discusses Mitiq project for error mitigation in quantum computers.
  • Misty discusses the growth of quantum computing as a field, with a focus on the Unitary Fund and its role in developing error mitigation techniques.
• Non-traditional background in quantum computing. 3:31
  • Misty Wahl shares her non-traditional background in mechanical engineering and project management, transitioning to quantum software development and research through self-study and online courses.
  • Misty joined Mitiq as a full-time technical staff member in March 2022, contributing to quantum error mitigation and software development through their experience with unitary hack.
  • Unitary Hack is a unique event hosted by Unitary Fund, where participants can tag issues in their GitHub repos and community can choose to solve them, providing valuable experience and connections in the quantum computing field.
• Quantum error mitigation techniques and software frameworks. 8:31
  • Misty Wahl describes her experience with the Mitiq framework
  • Misty explains how zero noise extrapolation works
  • Misty Wahl: By intentionally adding noise to quantum computations, researchers can extrapolate to the zero noise limit and estimate the optimal value of an expectation value.
• Quantum error mitigation techniques. 21:57
  • Misty believes that error mitigation will be crucial in the transition to fault-tolerant quantum computers, and will be used to enhance results at every step.
  • Misty presents a technique combining quantum error mitigation and quantum error correction to scale the distance of the surface code and improve error rate.
• Quantum computing, open source, and research funding. 28:56
  • Unitary Fund is building an open-source quantum community through community calls on Discord, with the goal of fostering collaboration and advancing quantum computing.
  • Unitary Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that funds research and development projects in AI, blockchain, and more through government grants and corporate sponsorships.

In this episode, Kevin and Sebastian are joined by Alex Keesling, CEO of QuEra Computing, for a discussion about his work with neutral atom arrays for simulation and computation. Alex describes his very early introduction to quantum information science as a high school student in Mexico, which kicked off a defining fascination with the field. At MIT as an undergraduate he started working with photonic systems, and as a PdD student with Misha Lukin at Harvard he played an instrumental role in the "atom array" project that eventually was spun out as QuEra. Today, QuEra's Aquila device has 256 atoms in its array that can be used as for analog Hamiltonian simulations, and is accessible on the cloud via AWS' Braket service. Alex explains in detail how these devices work, what physics breakthroughs they rely on for their operation, and where they may be going in the future with work underway on digital gates for universal computation. Additionally Alex takes us through some of the incredible scientific results these devices have already made possible, and discusses what the future of both scientific and commercial applications might hold.

The QuEra team published a deep dive into their Aquila device and its capabilities in a paper called Aquila: QuEra's 256-qubit neutral-atom quantum computer. 

In this episode of The New Quantum Era, hosts Sebastian Hassinger and Kevin Rowney interview Daniel Stick, a researcher at Sandia National Lab. They discuss the fascinating world of ion traps, a novel approach to quantum computing architecture. Stick explains the concept of suspending atoms inside a radio frequency Paul trap and utilizing laser pulses to manipulate their qubit states. The conversation also delves into the advantages and limitations of ion traps compared to other architectures. Stick shares exciting advancements in their technology, including the enchilada trap, developed as part of the Quantum Systems Accelerator project. Tune in to learn more about the cutting-edge research happening in the field of quantum computing.

[00:07:14] Large scale ion trap. 
[00:10:29] Entangling gates. 
[00:14:14] Major innovations in magneto optical systems. 
[00:17:30] The Name "Enchilada" 
[00:21:16] Combining chains for collective gates. 
[00:27:02] Sympathetic cooling and decoherence. 
[00:30:16] Unique CMOS application. 
[00:33:08] CMOS compatible photonics. 
[00:38:04] More breakthroughs on accuracy. 
[00:41:39] Scaling quantum computing systems. 
[00:45:00] Private industry and technology scaling. 
[00:51:36] Ion trap technology progress. 
[00:54:39] Spreading the word and building community.

• 00:01:15 - "So these architectures have, I think, powerful advantages versus other architectures."
• 00:18:30 - "So that was the name."
• 00:23:34 - "That's correct. That's that is one of the selling points for trapped ion quantum computing is that there is no threshold temperature at which you make the qubit go from behaving really well to behaving, you know, above which things would operate really poorly."
• 00:35:37 - "That is the grand vision that you've got this chip sitting inside of a chamber, and a bunch of digital signals go in and out of it."
• 00:38:40 - "What's a few exponents between friends anyway?"
• 00:41:39 - "That is one of the things that we have to think about is our gates are just, I don't know, 100 times to a thousand times slower than superconducting quantum computing systems or solid state quantum computing systems and ways to get around that have to leverage other kind of other attempts that are not limited by the physical speeds that are possible with an ion trap."
• 00:48:43 - "Do you have a paperclip, Kevin? That's all you need."

Title: Operating at the Quantum Limit with Dr. Dana Anderson

“In 25 to 30 years, quantum is going to be in the kitchen, sitting next to the toaster.” — Dr. Dana Anderson

Description: Welcome to another episode of The New Quantum Era Podcast hosted by Kevin Rowney and Sebastian Hassinger. Today, they are joined by Dr. Dana Anderson to talk about quantum computation, simulation, and sensing technologies using ultracold neutral atoms. Dr. Anderson is Chief Strategy Officer of Infleqtion, which was founded in 2007 as ColdQuanta and recently changed its name after acquiring Super.tech. Dr. Anderson is an applied physicist trained in quantum optics with extensive experience in optical neural networks, signal processing, precision measurement, and what he calls the field of “atomtronics.”

Key Takeaways:

[3:34] Dr. Anderson shares how he found his passion in physics and his entry point to quantum information science in general.

[5:13] How do lasers make atoms cold?

[7:13] Does Dr. Anderson think that what was learned from building atomic clocks and quantum devices has accelerated the development and maturation of the technologies behind the neutral atom arrays?

[10:44] Dr. Anderson talks about the optical lattice.

[12:41] Dr. Anderson addresses the early dawn of the transistor and the parallels with what he calls our age of atomtronics.

[14:00] Does Dr. Anderson think components on the optical side continue to shrink?

[15:17] Dr. Anderson explains how he uses machine learning to train an interferometer.

[17:44] Would machine learning assist in qubit control?

[25:05] What kind of new sensing technologies will emerge into the market?

[27:31] Dr. Anderson shares NASA developments regarding climate change.

[29:31] There will be a home-use application for quantum (and it will be boring, according to Dr. Anderson).

[31:48] Dr. Anderson discusses the benefits of meeting quantum and machine learning.

[36:06] Dr. Anderson helps us understand how the Infleqtion platform and quantum computation could emerge as a set of practical outcomes.

[45:02] Sebastian and Dr. Anderson discuss Infleqtion’s acquisition of Super.tech and what they have been working on.

[47:18] What does Dr. Anderson see on the horizon for the next 12 to 24 months for neutral atoms?

Mentioned in this episode:

Visit The New Quantum Era Podcast

The Nobel Prize in physics for Bose Einstein Condensates
Learn more about Infleqtion
NASA Cold Atom Lab 

Tweetables and Quotes:

“Every atom is a qubit, and every atom is just like every other atom, and it is as perfect as it could be.“ — Dr. Dana Anderson

“Roughly speaking, the way to think about everything Infleqtion can be boiled down to atomtronics.” — Dr. Dana Anderson

“If you are not operating at a quantum limit, you are not competitive .” — Dr. Dana Anderson

If anyone needs no introduction on a podcast about quantum computing, it's John Preskill. His paper "Quantum Computing in the NISQ era and beyond," published in 2018, is the source of the acronym "NISQ," for Noisy, Intermediate Scale Quantum" computers -- basically everything we are going to build until we get to effective error correction. It's been cited almost 6000 times since, and remains essential reading to this day.

John is a particle physicist and professor at Caltech whose central interests are actually cosmology, quantum matter, and quantum gravity -- he sees quantum computing as a powerful means to gain more understanding of the fundamental behavior of our universe. We discuss the information paradox of black holes, quantum error correction, some history of the field, and the work he's doing with his PhD student Robert (Hsin-Yuan) Huang using machine learning to estimate various properties of quantum systems. 

• How did you become interested in quantum information? 5:13
• The discovery of Shor’s algorithm. 10:11
• Quantum error correction. 15:51
• Black holes and it from qubit. 21:19
• Is there a parallel between error correcting codes and holographic projection of three dimensions? 27:27
• The difference between theory and experiment in quantum matter. 38:56
• Scientific applications of quantum computing. 55:58

Notable links:

• The Physics of Quantum Information, adapted from John's talk at the Solvay Conference on the Physics of Information
• Quantum Computing 40 Years Later, an update to John's NISQ paper on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the conference at Endicott, the Physics of Computation.
• Lecture notes for John's class on quantum computing at Caltech, PH229
• Predicting many properties of a quantum system from very few measurements, one of the papers Robert Huang has published with John, appearing in Nature Physics

Tweetables and Quotes:

“The idea that you can solve problems efficiently that you'd never be able to solve because it's a quantum world and not a world governed by classical physics, I thought that was one of the coolest ideas I'd ever encountered.” — John Preskill

“There's something different about quantum information than ordinary information. You can't look at it without disturbing it.” — John Preskill

“Ideas which were being developed without fundamental physics, necessarily in mind, like quantum error correction, have turned out to be very relevant in other areas of physics.” — John Preskill

“Thinking about quantum error correction in the context of gravitation led us to construct new types of codes which weren't previously known. “ — John Preskill

“With quantum computers and quantum simulators, we can start to investigate new types of matter, new phases, which are far from equilibrium.“ — John Preskill.

 Welcome to another episode of The New Quantum Era Podcast hosted by Kevin Rowney and Sebastian Hassinger. Today, they are joined by another distinguished researcher, Dr. Harry Buhrman. Dr. Buhrman is a professor at the University of Amsterdam, he's a director at the CWI, and he's the director at Qusoft as well. He's got a long and illustrious career in quantum information. Today, Dr. Buhrman takes us through some of his earlier work and some of his areas of interest, and he also discloses details of his recent paper which was going to be called Ultra Fast Quantum Circuits for Quantum State Preparation, but was posted to the arXiv as State preparation by shallow circuits using feed forward, which provides fascinating results with respect to the core architecture divided into four layers and time complexity around that framework.

Key Takeaways:

[4:45] Sebastian introduces Dr. Harry Buhrman.

[5:31] How did Dr. Buhrman become interested in Quantum Computing?

[9:31] Dr. Buhrman remembers the first time he heard about the complexity class known as fast quantum polynomial time, or BQP.

[11:35]  Dr. Buhrman and Richard Cleve started working on communication complexity.

[14:14] Dr. Buhrman discusses the opportunity that arose after Shor’s algorithm.

[14:53] Dr. Buhrman has also written biology papers explaining how he became involved in this field.

[18:05] Is quantum computation and quantum algorithms the main focus now regarding Dr. Buhrman’s areas of study?

[20:06] Software and hardware are codependent, so codesigning is needed.

[20:58]. What are the big unsolved problems in the areas of time complexity and hierarchy for quantum? 

[24:50] Does Dr. Buhrman think it's possible that there could be a future where some of the classical time complexity problems could be powerfully informed by quantum information science and Quantum Time complexity discovery?

[27:32] Does Dr. Buhrman think that, over time, the distinction between classical information theory and quantum information theory will erode?

[28:50] Dr. Burhman talks about his Team's most recent paper.

[33:55]  Dr. Buhrman’s group is using tmid-circuit measurement and classical fan out to extend the amount of computation time 

[35:04] How does this approach differ from VQE or QAOA?

[38:35] About Dr. Buhrman’s current paper, is he thinking through algorithms that may be able to be implemented in at least toy problems sort of scale to try this theory out and implementation?

{39:22] Sebastian talks about  QubiC, an open-source Lawrence Berkeley National Lab project.

[41:14]  Dr. Buhrman recognizes he is very much amazed by the fact that when he started in this field in the mid-late 90s, it was considered very esoteric and beautiful but probably wouldn't lead to anything practical.

[43:49] Dr. Buhrman assures that there is a chance that those intractable problems for classical computing also remain intractable for quantum computers.

[44:24] What's the next big frontier for Dr. Buhrman and his team?

[47:03] Dr. Buhrman explains Quantum Position Verification used for implementing secure communication protocols.

[50:56] Sebastian comments on the hilarious and interesting titles for papers Dr. Buhrman comes up with.

[53:10] Kevin and Sebastian share the highlights of an incredible conversation with Dr. Buhrman.

Mentioned in this episode:

Visit The New Quantum Era Podcast

Quantum entanglement and communication complexity

The first peptides: the evolutionary transition between prebiotic amino acids and early proteins

A Qubit, a Coin, and an Advice String Walk Into a Relational Problem

Six hypotheses in search of a theorem

Tweetables and Quotes:

“ Biological processes are quantum mechanical, and sometimes you need the quantum mechanical description to understand them, and indeed, quantum computers could be of great help in simulating them and understanding them better than we currently do.“ — Dr. Harry Buhrman

“There's a huge gap between what we can do and what we can prove is true.“ — Dr. Harry Buhrman

“Our problems have become bigger but also more interesting, I would say.“ — Dr. Harry Buhrman

“We're not the first ones to see that having mid-computation measurements plus classical feed forwards actually is very useful and can help you solve problems or generate states that if you don't have this  are impossible  to make.” — Dr. Harry Buhrman

“Big companies are very interested in QC not only for building quantum computers but also figuring out whether it is useful from a software point of view. ” — Dr. Harry Buhrman