Quantum News Briefs February 3: China’s Origin Quantum announced it delivered a commercial 24-qubit quantum computer; DARPA gets serious about quantum with 5-year funding to build fault-tolerant quantum computers; Princeton researchers reveal microscopic quantum correlations of ultracold molecules + MORE

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has announced that it has selected the companies that will receive funding under its “Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC)” (US2QC) program. Quantum News Briefs summarizes the February 1 discussion in Forbes by Paul-Smith Goodson about the importance of the funding and the recipients.
DARPA is sponsoring the US2QC program to explore new ways to scale qubit count for larger systems, create additional layers of entanglement connectivity for faster performance and develop a broader set of quantum error correction algorithms for fault tolerance. Specifically, DARPA wants to determine if relatively new quantum technologies such as neutral atom, topological and photonics can be leveraged to develop a fault-tolerant quantum computer within ten years. Although the amount of funding wasn’t specified, Smith-Goodson expects it will be enough to significantly move the needle for the corporate teams involved, given the program’s five-year span and DARPA’s $4.1 billion 2023 budget.
The recipients are:
–Atom Computing
–PsiQuantum
–Microsoft
DARPA is sponsoring the US2QC program to explore new ways to scale qubit count for larger systems, create additional layers of entanglement connectivity for faster performance and develop a broader set of quantum error correction algorithms for fault tolerance. Specifically, DARPA wants to determine if relatively new quantum technologies such as neutral atom, topological and photonics can be leveraged to develop a fault-tolerant quantum computer within ten years. Although the amount of funding wasn’t specified, I expect it will be enough to significantly move the needle for the corporate teams involved, given the program’s five-year span and DARPA’s $4.1 billion 2023 budget.
It is important for the United States to maintain its global lead in quantum computing and be the first to build a fault-tolerant quantum machine. Joe Altepeter, US2QC program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, helped explain why. He said: “Experts disagree on whether a utility-scale quantum computer based on conventional designs is still decades away or could be achieved much sooner. The goal of US2QC is to reduce the danger of strategic surprise from underexplored quantum computing systems.” Read Smith- Goodson’s article in-entirety by clicking here. 

Princeton University researchers have achieved a major breakthrough by microscopically studying molecular gases at a level never before achieved by previous research. Quantum News Briefs summaries the announcement.
The Princeton team, led by Waseem Bakr, associate professor of physics, was able to cool molecules down to ultracold temperatures, load them into an artificial crystal of light known as an optical lattice, and study their collective quantum behavior with high spatial resolution such that each individual molecule could be observed.
This experiment has profound implications for fundamental physics research, such as the study of many-body physics, which looks at the emergent behavior of ensembles of interacting quantum particles. The research also might accelerate the development of large-scale quantum computer systems.
In the quest to build large-scale quantum systems, both for quantum computing and for more general scientific applications, researchers have used a variety of different alternatives—everything from trapped ions and atoms to electrons confined in “quantum dots.” The goal is to transform these various alternatives into what are called qubits, which are the building blocks of a quantum computer system. Quantum computers have much greater computing power and capacity—exponentially greater—than classical computer systems, and can solve problems classical computers have difficulty solving.
Although so far no single type of qubit has emerged as the front-runner, Bakr and his team believe that molecular systems, while less explored than other platforms, hold particular promise.  Click here to read original article in-entirety on Princeton Physics site.