Google thinks quantum computing is going to solve some of our biggest computing problems. So it’s bought a quantum computer.

The $15 million computer, created by D-Wave Systems, marks a major first for Google, which is teaming up with NASA to explore how quantum computing will change how the company processes all the information it collects.

Quantum computing, which sounds like something out of science fiction, uses quantum mechanics to operate on data. I’ll spare you the specifics, but essentially the technology allows computers not only to work faster but also to do so with lots more information. (In theory, anyway; researchers are still validating the claims.)

The concept can be applied to a variety of ideas, but Google plans to focus its efforts on machine learning, which is a study of how computers learn from data. This, in turn, means better results for features like personalized search and real-time traffic monitoring, both of which rely on lots of data from many sources at once.

Google engineering director Hartmut Neven doesn’t understate what he thinks the project will do for computing. “We actually think quantum machine learning may provide the most creative problem-solving process under the known laws of physics,” he writes in a post on the Google Research Blog.

And Google’s not alone. Lockheed Martin (which bought a D-Wave Quantum computer in 2011), IBM, Microsoft, and BlackBerry creator Mike Lazaridis are all exploring the potential uses for quantum computing. As is the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) in Waterloo, Ontario, which is the second-largest quantum computing center in the world.

“The holy grail is a general purpose quantum computer. That will be many many orders of magnitude more powerful than all the computers in the world today,” IQC  executive-in-residence Rob Crow told VentureBeat.

I’m in the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Ontario, which just added a new 283,000-square foot, $160 million research facility to its existing two buildings.

“We work on the science of the small,” executive-in-residence Rob Crow says. “We sit at the junction of pure research and technological innovation.”

The new facility, which will accommodate some of the Institute’s current 200 researchers as well as provide space for an additional 200 over the next year or so, took seven years to build, mostly because it needs to be completely insulated from outside radiation, vibration, and contamination.

As Martin LaForest, a senior manager at IQC explained, vibration — and sound — is the movement of molecules. And molecular-level nanotechnological assembly is tough to do when things are moving.

That is why the Institute has 3 feet-thick concrete floors and a completely isolated foundation that goes down 30 feet underground to bedrock. And why the building took seven years to complete.

Source: John Koetsier

Martin LaForest

“This is the second-biggest quantum computing center in the world,” Crow says. “We’ll double in a few years and are recruiting experimentalists right now from all around the world.”

The world’s biggest quantum computing lab is in Singapore. China is building two facilities. Pittsburgh is just starting its own, and Russia has invested $100 million in building yet another quantum computing institute.

Why all the fuss and bother?

“The holy grail is a general purpose quantum computer,” Crow explains. “That will be many many orders of magnitude more powerful than all the computers in the world today.” (Maybe even powerful enough to serve as the brain for a Cylon, as a recent Forbes profile suggested.)

A quantum computer calculates using quantum mechanical phenomena, essentially using what Einstein called the “spooky” nature of tiny particles, such as photons, to exist in multiple contradictory states at the same time. Critically, that enables quantum computers to calculate certain problems much more quickly than classical computers like the one you’re using right now. For instance, while standard computers represent data via bits that can be either on or off, or a 1 or a 0, a 10-quantum bit computer or 10-qubit computer, could simultaneously represent data in 1,024 states.

Source: John Koetsier

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“Small quantum computers already exist,” LaForest says, but adds that ”we will be many years to a useful quantum computer.”

That’s what the Institute is all about, and that’s the “holy grail” the researchers are seeking. It’s also why Mike Lazaridis of BlackBerry fame (and fortune) funded the development of the institute, and set up a $100 million venture capital fund to commercialize products and technologies discovered at the facility.

There have already been multiple spin-off product and companies, including one called  Universal Quantum Devices that makes a time tagger for photos, which can accurately count and tag the arrival of individual photons, and another device, the world’s smallest chip for making entangled photos, which are critical for quantum communication studies.

In other words, LaForest says, we’re in the pick ax-and-shovel phase of the quantum era:

“Some of the most important tools are the ones you have to build yourself, and then you sell them to labs around the world working on the problem.”

Once the mission bears fruit, however, as Crowe is confident it will, the results will be immense. Much better simulation capabilities, new technologies for biological studies, better weather and climate modeling computers, amazing cryptography capabilities, and quantum sensors that could map the interior of the earth for geological exploration are just some of the possibilities.

And, even cooler perhaps, a Star Trek-like medical tricorder.

“We actually think we can build one of these things now,” says LaForrest. “Now we’re almost to the point where we can do MRI on the molecular level.”

And maybe, that’s even thinking small. Because the quantum computer, in spite of its potentially sub-atomic size, is a big, big deal.

“We are trying to be the first to build the quantum computer,” says Crow. “When we do it, and we will do it eventually, it’s going to be bigger than the moon landing.”

I spent the morning at the Waterloo, Ontario Institute for Quantum Computing, one of the world’s top quantum computing and nanotechnology labs. In a brand-new 235,000 square foot, $160 million dollar facility that, inside, looks like the starship Enterprise, I met Alice and Bob.

They weren’t very talkative, of course — they’re computers.

“In quantum cryptography, you’re sending information from A to B … we call A ‘Alice’ and B ‘Bob,’” says Martin LaForest, PhD and a senior manager at IQC. “The eavesdropper, naturally, is Eve.”

Source: John Koetsier

“Bob” receives quantum communications

One part of the vast facility is given over to Vadim — last name not given — who hacks commercially-available quantum communications devices like these two from ID Quantique for fun and profit. The fun is the success, and the profit is that ID Quantique lets him keep Alice and Bob, and even sends him more machines — as do other quantum cryptography companies.

“He’s sort of offering a service to the community,” LaForest says. “If you think you have a good quantum key distribution system, give it to me … and I’ll give it my best shot. And so far, he’s very good.”

Modern cryptography is based on our inability to quickly solve challenging mathematical problems, such as the factoring of very large primes. Theoretically almost any security solution available is hackable over time, but realistically you might need months, years, or even decades to crack some of the top 128-bit and 256-bit encryption algorithms available today.

That’s not possible with quantum cryptography.

“If you want to crack quantum communication, you have to do it in real time,” says LaForest. “When you try to observe it, you perturb it … and you can’t copy it because copying is the same thing, give or take, as looking and copying.”

LaForest is referencing the physicist Schrodinger’s cat example. As Schrodinger famously said, you cannot definitely know much about a quantum state, because the act of observing the state changes it. He illustrated that point with a cat in a box which has a 50/50 chance of dying based on the decay of one radioactive particle: a quantum phenomenon. You cannot check whether the cat is alive or dead, because checking changes reality, and so the cat exists in an indeterminate state, neither alive nor dead.

Source: John Koetsier

Alice is the starting point for quantum communication

And yet, it is still possible to hack quantum cryptography, as Vadim demonstrates every month or so.

Alice and Bob communicate via connected photons — particles of light that have been “entangled” in a process even Einstein called spooky — and that communication can’t be intercepted without the intended recipient knowing about it.

But once the message has been received, it’s another matter.

“Vadim is trying to find the implementation flaws,” LaForest told me. “This is one of the challenges right now — the protocol is secure … but its physical implementation might not be. You can have faulty detectors, or you can play tricks with the electronics.”

Which makes the work of Eve — or Vadim — very challenging indeed.

But that work, LaForest says, does not go unrewarded by commercial users of quantum encryption systems:

“It’s important to note: The commercially available boxes are secure. Most of the time, Vadim finds the problems in what they call the research system, and in the commercial system, those bugs are already fixed.”

Quantum Wave Fund (QWave) has pooled $30 million to create the first fund dedicated to companies developing quantum technologies. Quantum mechanics is futuristic stuff. It is a branch  of physics that studies matter and energy at the microscopic scale (to put it simply). Aside from stretching the limits of reasoning and consciousness and raising questions about the nature of the universe, quantum physics potentially has commercial applications.

QWave will invest in companies that are applying quantum materials and technologies  to solve real-world problems. Serge Haroche and David Wineland won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on quantum computing, which could dramatically up the processing capabilities of computers.

So far, QWave has invested in startups tackling quantum encryption security, new materials, and quantum devices. According to a release, the potential results of research in this area are “safe data transmission networks, new materials with superior properties, optical sub-micron transistors, high-frequency optical electronics, new systems for ultrasensitive imaging of the brain, and compact and accurate clocks for navigation systems.”

Serguei Beloussov is one of the partners of the Quantum Wave Fund, as well as at the venture firm Runa Capital. He said in a statement that the venture community stopped investing in “sophisticated capital intensive projects” and shifted to focus on software. While there was intensive research going on at universities and scientific centers, many of the scientists had no idea how to turn their work into a business. However, anticipation runs high for the impact quantum computing could potentially have on the technology industry, and QWave strobes to be one of the “pioneers to drive this opportunity.”

QWave is headquartered in Boston with outposts in New York and Moscow and is seeking to ultimately close the fund at $100 million. Read the press release. 

While NASA is busy extending the Internet to outer space by increasing fault-tolerance and caching for packets traveling long distances over long periods of time, Chinese scientists are helping invent something that could make communication between Mars and Earth even more reliable. Or help create the next generation of quantum computers.

I’m talking about data teleportation. Data has been teleported before — as far as 89 miles —  but never between two large, physically visible objects.

So the scientists at Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences in Anhui, China entangled photonic quantum bits in a quantum memory node, sent one of the entangled particles  to another quantum memory node via an optical cable, made changes to the spinwave state of the nearby photon, and observed the same changes happening in the remote photo.

If you understand this, you’re a genius. Stop reading immediately and create a Star Trek-style matter teleporter, charge the world royalties, and retire as the richest human in the history of the world.

The stupid translation — meaning one I can understand — is that some super-smart geeks mysteriously connected two tiny particles so that they want to be twins but cruelly separated them. They then made changes to Mike (the nearest one) and observed equivalent changes automatically happening in Ike (the farthest one).

What’s this good for?

The upshot is that scientists can read data that has been received without, apparently, having been sent. Without, that is, having been sent by any physical means that we currently understand: no radio waves, no light messages, no audible communication, and yes, no smoke signals.

Which means that if the distance over which this occurs can be increased, and if you can reliably transport half of your entangled quantum bits and bites to Mars, Jupiter, or Alpha Centauri … you’ve got an awesome interplanetary Internet that’s reliable even if there’s a solar flare filling local space with charged particles and drowning out radio waves. Or, you’ve got the makings of a quantum computer that can have parts in Washington, Beijing, and Valles Marineris, the Martian Grand Canyon.

Unfortunately, however, you do not get instantaneous transmission. You still have to wait the 15 or so minutes it takes for light to travel between Earth and Mars, depending on where the two planets are lining up.

Because sadly, although teleportation is cool and spooky and amazingly high-tech and doesn’t travel by light, it does obey Einstein’s laws of physics and will not move faster than light.

Seems odd, doesn’t it, that such a crazy metaphysical technology feels bound by that cosmic speed limit?

photo credit: - Dave Morrow - via photopin cc; hat tip: ExtremeTech

Liberal arts major that I am, anything involving the term “quantum” is beyond my scope. But a company called D-Wave Systems brought it into my attention today, with its quantum computer that attracted $30 million in funding.

Quantum computing is a new field. In vastly simplified terms, these computers run off chips comprised of “quantum bits” instead of traditional chips. Systems running off these qubits have the potential to be way more powerful, which appeals to organizations that rely on computers to tackle extremely complicated problems.

The two most recent investors in the round are Bezos Expeditions and In-Q-Tel, the investment vehicles of Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos and the American intelligence community, respectively. Earlier investors include the Business Development Bank of Cananda, Draper Fisher Jurveston, and Goldman Sachs. This brings D-Wave’s total funding to almost $100 million, a significant show of faith for technology that has yet to be proven out. D-Wave is based in Vancouver.

Read the press release.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Research in Motion founder Mike Lazaridis, who created the BlackBerry smartphone, has donated $100 million to a new center pursuing radically small computing innovations.

The Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre will open tomorrow, Bloomberg reports, and it’s where Lazaridis will double-down on his efforts to promote technological improvements in quantum computing and nanotechnology.

The massive donation in nascent technology isn’t anything new for Lazaridis: In 2000, he founded the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and has donated around $150 million to it so far. He’s also donated more than $100 million to the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing.

Lazaridis and his RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie both stepped down from their roles in January, after facing criticism for not innovating RIM’s hardware and software to compete with the iPhone and BlackBerry. But things aren’t shaping up much better for new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, who in June announced that next-gen BlackBerry 10 devices won’t appear until 2013.

Why the fascination with tiny computing? Both nanotechnology and quantum computing have far-reaching applications in fields like biotechnology, allowing us to develop treatments that work at the cellular level. Lazaridis also tells Bloomberg that this research could lead to tiny energy sources and self-repairing elements for nuclear plants. Most importantly, the move towards nanotech and quantum computing will allow us to leap beyond the limitations of Moore’s Law, the notion that number of transistors on integrated circuits double every two years.

“We can’t offer [people working at the center] ocean, beaches, or mountains, but we can try and offer them the best environment, the best collaborators, the best equipment that would be conducive to them making the breakthroughs of their lifetime,” Lazaridis told Bloomberg. “One of the best ways to describe this is, we’re trying to break the known laws of physics.”

Photo via textlad/Flickr

IBM is announcing today that it has made major advances toward creating a practical, full-scale quantum computer, a fabled, theoretical machine that relies on the tiniest atomic properties to compute problems faster than any supercomputer that exists today.

Scientists at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., said that their quantum computing solution leverages the underlying quantum mechanics of matter and that a real quantum computer, which could work on millions of computations at once, could be built in the next decade. The hugely multitasking devices will have big implications for fields such as data encryption.

Quantum computing has been a Holy Grail in research since Nobel Prize physicist Richard Feynman challenged scientists  in 1981 to build computers based on quantum mechanics, which predict that matter can be in multiple states at once, in contrast to the on-off transistors that have been the foundation of computing since the 1940s. For decades, the work was all theoretical. But now IBM scientists believe they’re on the cusp of building systems that will redefine computing.

“I do think this will happen within my lifetime,” said Matthias Steffen, manager of the Experimental Quantum Computing group, in an interview with VentureBeat. Steffen has been working on the technology for more than a decade. “Quantum computing could revolutionize information technology compared to what we know now.”

Some of the advances in creating new quantum computers are astounding. Last week, Australian and American physicists at the University of New South Wales and Purdue University reported they had built a transistor from a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon crystal. That helped lay the groundwork for a quantum computer.

The IBM scientists made their advances independently and will present them today at the annual American Physical Society meeting from Feb. 27 to March 1 in Boston. In contrast to last week’s news, the IBM “qubit,” or quantum bit technology, is built with relatively large dimensions. IBM showed it could put three qubits on one chip (picture at top). Individual 3D qubits are suspended in the center of the cavity on a small sapphire chip, as shown in the smaller picture.

Steffen said that the new quantum computers should be able to do certain computations, such as factoring a prime number, much faster than traditional machines.

“Quantum computing could factor numbers, or break them down into their prime numbers, in exponentially fewer steps than can be done with classical computers,” Steffen said. “That helps with decryption.”

Right now, IBM can put about five qubit prototypes on a chip. But over time, it may want to put more than a million qubits on a chip.

The scientists have set three new records for reducing the error in elementary computations while retaining the integrity of quantum mechanical properties in quantum bits (or qubits), which are the basic units that carry information within quantum computing. Those qubits allow a quantum computer to work simultaneously on many problems while a desktop PC typically handles a limited number of computations at a time. A single 250-qubit state contains more bits of data than there are particles in the universe.

IBM is creating superconducting qubits using established techniques for manufacturing silicon chips. That gives the qubit devices the potential to be mass-produced in thousands of millions.

Besides factoring very large numbers, the new devices could be used to search databases of unstructured information such as videos. They could also be used to do optimization tasks and solve interesting new mathematical problems.

“The quantum computing work we are doing shows it is no longer just a brute force physics experiment. It’s time to start creating systems based on this science that will take computing to a whole new level,” said Steffen.

How it works

In classical computers, the basic piece of information is a bit. A bit can have only one of two values:: “1″ or “0″. That forms the basis for the on-off nature of digital computers, like a light switch. It is either on or off. Qubits can hold a value of “1″ or “0″ as well as both values at the same time. This feature is known as “superposition” and it lets quantum computers do millions of calculations at once.

The challenge of harnessing this power is controlling or removing quantum decoherence, or the creation of errors in calculations caused by interference from heat, electromagnetic radiation, and materials defects in a chip. Scientists have experimented with ways to reduce the errors and lengthen the period in which qubits retain their quantum mechanical properties. If the time is long enough, error correction can make it possible to perform long and complex calculations.

IBM says there’s a variety of ways to achieve the end goal of a functioning quantum computer. IBM’s group focused on using superconducting qubits — basically designer molecules — that allow easier mass production. It created a 3D superconducting qubit (3D qubit) that originated from research at Yale University. The 3D qubit is a sandwich of a superconducting electrode, an insulator, and another superconducting electrode. Put together with a capacitor, the device captures the basic function of a qubit. The dimensions of the qubit are around 10 or 100 microns, large in terms of chip technology. If you add more and more qubits, you get something that can work on many different calculations as the same time.

The team created a 3D qubit that allowed the devices to remain stable for up to 100 microseconds. After that, they collapse into a less useful ground state. When they collapse, they produce an error. But the 100-microsecond time is just past the minimum threshold needed to institute effective error correction. In other words, if you can correct an error quickly enough, the device can still be useful. Over the past decade, this technology has been improved about 10,000 times, Steffen said.

“We are now good enough where we can put five or 10 of these on a chip and start doing quantum calculations,” Steffen said. “We have to solve a number of engineering questions. It’s exciting to be at this point.”

The IBM team also did separate experiments, creating a 2D qubit device with two-qubit logic operations. The operation showed a 95 percent success rate and a coherence time of 10 microseconds. The numbers are just short of the time required for effective error correction. The net result of the advances is that a practical quantum computer could be created in the not so distant future.

“The superconducting qubit research led by the IBM team has been progressing in a much focused way on the road to a reliable, scalable quantum computer,” said David DiVincenzo, professor at the Institute of Quantum Information at Research Center Juelich. “The device performance that they have now reported brings them nearly to the tipping point; we can now see the building blocks that will be used to prove that error correction can be effective and that reliable logical qubits can be realized.”

While most of the work has focused on improving components within the devices, the research must now focus on building systems that integrate error correction, input-output, and cost issues. IBM envisions a quantum computer connected to a classical computing system. Today, the smallest devices made may have circuits 22 nanometers apart, or less than 100 atoms.

IBM started with five researchers and it now has 15 on the project.

Pictured at top: The Silicon chip housing a total of three qubits. The chip is back-mounted on a PC board and connects to I/O coaxial lines via wire bonds (scale: 8mm x 4mm). A larger assembly of such qubits and resonators are expected to be used for a scalable architecture. Australian and American physicists have built a working transistor from a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon crystal.

[Image credits: IBM]