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Research from QphoX, Rigetti, and Qblox Demonstrating Optical Readout Technique for Superconducting Qubits Published in Nature Physics
GlobeNewswire
DELFT, The Netherlands and Berkeley, Calif., Feb. 11, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- QphoX B.V., a Dutch quantum technology startup that is developing leading frequency conversion systems for quantum applications, Rigetti Computing, Inc. (RGTI.NaE) , a pioneer in full-stack quantum-classical computing, and Qblox, a leading innovator in quantum control stack development, today announced that their joint research demonstrating the ability to readout superconducting qubits with an optical transducer was published in Nature Physics.
Quantum computing has the potential to drive transformative breakthroughs in fields such as advanced material design, artificial intelligence, and drug discovery. Of the quantum computing modalities, superconducting qubits are a leading platform towards realizing a practical quantum computer given their fast gate speeds and ability to leverage existing semiconductor industry manufacturing techniques. However, fault-tolerant quantum computing will likely require 10,000 to a million physical qubits. The sheer amount of wiring, amplifiers and microwave components required to operate such large numbers of qubits far exceeds the capacity of modern-day dilution refrigerators, a core component of a superconducting quantum computing system, in terms of both space and passive heat load.
A potential solution to this problem may be to replace coaxial cables and other cryogenic components with optical fibers, which have a considerably smaller footprint and negligible thermal conductivity. The challenge lies in converting the microwave signals used to control qubits into infrared light that can be transmitted through fiber. This is where microwave-to-optical transduction comes into play, a field dedicated to the coherent conversion of microwave photons to optical photons. QphoX has developed transducers with piezo-optomechanical technology that are capable of performing this conversion, forming an interface between superconducting qubits and fiber-optics.
To demonstrate the potential of this technology, QphoX, Rigetti and Qblox connected a transducer to a superconducting qubit, with the goal of measuring its state using light transmitted through an optical fiber. The results of this collaborative effort have been published in Nature Physics. Remarkably, it was discovered that not only is the transducer capable of converting the signal that reads out the qubit, but that the qubit can also be sufficiently protected from decoherence introduced by thermal noise or stray optical photons from the transducer during operation.
"Microwave-to-optics transduction is a rapidly emerging technology with far-reaching implications for quantum computing. Our work demonstrates that transducers are now ready to interface with superconducting qubit technology. This is an exciting and crucial demonstration, with the potential for this technology being far reaching and potentially transformative for the development of quantum computers,” says Dr. Thierry van Thiel, lead author of the work and Lead Quantum Engineer at QphoX.
“Developing more efficient ways to design our systems is key as we work towards fault tolerance. This innovative, scalable approach to qubit signal processing is the result of our strong partnerships with QphoX and Qblox and showcases the value of having a modular technology stack. By allowing our partners to integrate their technology with ours, we are able to discover creative ways to solve long-standing engineering challenges,” says Dr. Subodh Kulkarni, Rigetti CEO.
“Realizing industrial-scale quantum computers comes with solving several critical bottlenecks. Many of these lie in the scalability of the readout and control of qubits. As Qblox is entirely focused on exactly this theme, we are proud to be part of this pivotal demonstration that shows that QphoX microwave-to-optical transducers are a solid route to scalable quantum computing. We look forward to the next steps with Rigetti and QphoX to scale up this technology,” says Dr. Niels Bultink, Qblox CEO.
About QphoX
QphoX is the leading developer of quantum transduction systems that enable quantum computers to network over optical frequencies. Leveraging decades of progress in photonic, MEMS and superconducting device nanofabrication, their single-photon interfaces bridge the gap between microwave, optical and telecom frequencies to provide essential quantum links between computation, state storage and networking. QphoX is based in Delft, the Netherlands. See www.qphox.eu/ for more information.
About Rigetti
Rigetti is a pioneer in full-stack quantum computing. The Company has operated quantum computers over the cloud since 2017 and serves global enterprise, government, and research clients through its Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services platform. In 2021, Rigetti began selling on-premises quantum computing systems with qubit counts between 24 and 84 qubits, supporting national laboratories and quantum computing centers. Rigetti’s 9-qubit Novera™ QPU was introduced in 2023 supporting a broader R&D community with a high-performance, on-premises QPU designed to plug into a customer’s existing cryogenic and control systems. The Company’s proprietary quantum-classical infrastructure provides high-performance integration with public and private clouds for practical quantum computing. Rigetti has developed the industry’s first multi-chip quantum processor for scalable quantum computing systems. The Company designs and manufactures its chips in-house at Fab-1, the industry’s first dedicated and integrated quantum device manufacturing facility. Learn more at www.rigetti.com/.
About Qblox
Qblox is a leading provider of scalable and modular qubit control stacks. Qblox operates at the frontier of the quantum revolution in supporting academic and industrial labs worldwide. The Qblox control stack, known as the Cluster, combines key technologies for qubit control and readout and supports a wide variety of qubit technologies. Qblox has grown to 130+ employees and continues to innovate to enable the quantum industry. Learn more at www.qblox.com/.
A segment of the Sleepy Hollow community mural along the Riverwalk. The Tarrytown Lighthouse and Gov Mario M. Cuomo Bridge are in the background.
Surrealart challenge "computer"
www.flickr.com/groups/2676496@N21/discuss/72157676804799524/
Also:
Let's Go YELLOW !! GLOW March 2017
www.flickr.com/groups/challenges_community_group/discuss/...
Developed by NASA, the tall tower on the left contains the necessary memory, hard drives, and processing for a quantum computer. The basic idea of quantum computing is that quantum bits, or qubits — which can exist in more than two states and be represented as both a 0 and 1 simultaneously — can be used to greatly boost computing power compared to even today’s most powerful super computers. This contrasts with the modern-day binary computing model, in which the many transistors contained in silicon chips can be either switched on or off and can thus only exist in two states, expressed as a 0 or 1.
The Monitor on top of the large building shows the Heart Nebula*.* Here's a gorgeous photo of the Heart Nebula, IC1805, captured by Rick Wiggins: bit.ly/1jFCZxT
Image used with permission, Credit: Rick Wiggins
Occasionally Qubit thinks she sees a bug on the ceiling and she whines incessantly until I lift her up so she can investigate.
WND JF3GPSFC nebula in exouniverse
Image credit: WANDER Space Probe / Navid Baraty
Big news! I’m excited to announce my new ongoing series of images taken by the WANDER space probe. WANDER (Wormhole Accelerated Nomad Delivering Exploratory Reconnaissance) is on a mission to explore beyond our universe and capture never-before-seen images of what exists in these strange worlds. WANDER travels by tunneling through wormholes, or “shortcuts” through spacetime. The wormholes are created from huge quantities of extremely dense matter in neutron stars and are filled with incredible amounts of negative energy harnessed from the vacuum of space. This negative energy holds the tunnel of the wormhole open long enough to be traversable.
With my technical background and knowledge of photography, I’m honored to have been selected as the lead image processor for the WANDER mission. WANDER uses special electronic detectors to record wavelengths of light throughout the range of the electromagnetic spectrum. This raw image data from WANDER is transmitted to Earth in the form of qubits (quantum bits) at nearly instantaneous speeds via quantum entanglement. My job is to analyze and edit this data to produce finished color images that accurately depict the grandeur of these universes.
UPDATE: For several months, the WANDER space probe mysteriously disappeared and completely ceased transmitting all data to Earth. With heavy hearts, all of us involved with the WANDER mission assumed the worst. Miraculously and quite unexpectedly, the WANDER resumed contact with our servers last week and data connection has been fully restored with the probe! I'm so happy to report that I've once again resumed my role as the lead image processor and will be posting images seen by the WANDER space probe in these strange and mysterious worlds.
First up is this image of a nebula designated WND JF3GPSFC. We're very interested in the unusual streams of gas emanating from this nebula and I'll be posting updates as we know more.
Follow updates from WANDER on twitter and on facebook.
WND 5C1O2CH Nebula in exouniverse
Image credit: WANDER Space Probe / Navid Baraty
Big news! I’m excited to announce my new ongoing series of images taken by the WANDER space probe. WANDER (Wormhole Accelerated Nomad Delivering Exploratory Reconnaissance) is on a mission to explore beyond our universe and capture never-before-seen images of what exists in these strange worlds. WANDER travels by tunneling through wormholes, or “shortcuts” through spacetime. The wormholes are created from huge quantities of extremely dense matter in neutron stars and are filled with incredible amounts of negative energy harnessed from the vacuum of space. This negative energy holds the tunnel of the wormhole open long enough to be traversable.
With my technical background and knowledge of photography, I’m honored to have been selected as the lead image processor for the WANDER mission. WANDER uses special electronic detectors to record wavelengths of light throughout the range of the electromagnetic spectrum. This raw image data from WANDER is transmitted to Earth in the form of qubits (quantum bits) at nearly instantaneous speeds via quantum entanglement. My job is to analyze and edit this data to produce finished color images that accurately depict the grandeur of these universes.
On occasion, WANDER will be making observations in our universe as it periodically returns to Earth for routine maintenance.
Follow updates from WANDER on twitter and on facebook.
Ghostly anomaly in Universe SBE133
Image credit: WANDER Space Probe / Navid Baraty
Big news! I’m excited to announce my new ongoing series of images taken by the WANDER space probe. WANDER (Wormhole Accelerated Nomad Delivering Exploratory Reconnaissance) is on a mission to explore beyond our universe and capture never-before-seen images of what exists in these strange worlds. WANDER travels by tunneling through wormholes, or “shortcuts” through spacetime. The wormholes are created from huge quantities of extremely dense matter in neutron stars and are filled with incredible amounts of negative energy harnessed from the vacuum of space. This negative energy holds the tunnel of the wormhole open long enough to be traversable.
With my technical background and knowledge of photography, I’m honored to have been selected as the lead image processor for the WANDER mission. WANDER uses special electronic detectors to record wavelengths of light throughout the range of the electromagnetic spectrum. This raw image data from WANDER is transmitted to Earth in the form of qubits (quantum bits) at nearly instantaneous speeds via quantum entanglement. My job is to analyze and edit this data to produce finished color images that accurately depict the grandeur of these universes.
On occasion, WANDER will be making observations in our universe as it periodically returns to Earth for routine maintenance.
Follow updates from WANDER on twitter and on facebook.
Este es uno de los rieles para mover las antenas del VLA. Oh, y Qubit al lado.
I like the vanishing point, but I also like the person smoking next to the car. I can't make up my mind about the cropping!
[update in 2015: the hardware curve that is "Rose's Law" (blue diamonds) remains on track. The software and performance/qubit (red stars, as applied to certain tasks) is catching up, and may lag by a few years from the original prediction overlaid onto the graph. Updated Graph here]
When I first met Geordie Rose in 2002, I was struck by his ability to explain complex quantum physics and the “spooky” underpinnings of quantum computers. I had just read David Deutsch’s Fabric of Reality where he predicts the possibility of such computers, and so I invited Rose to one of our tech conferences.
We first invested in 2003, and Geordie predicted that he would be able to demonstrate a two-bit quantum computer within 6 months. There was a certain precision to his predictions. With one bit under his belt, and a second coming, he went on to suggest that the number of qubits in a scalable quantum computing architecture should double every year. It sounded a lot like Gordon Moore’s prediction back in 1965, when he extrapolated from just five data points on a log-scale (his original plot is below).
So I called it “Rose’s Law” and that seemed to amuse him. Well, the decade that followed has been quite amazing. I commented on Rose’s Law four years ago on flickr, but I share this graph and some potential futures for the first time today.
So, how do we read the graph above? Like Moore’s Law, a straight line describes an exponential. But unlike Moore’s Law, the computational power of the quantum computer should grow exponentially with the number of entangled qubits as well. It’s like Moore’s Law compounded. (D-Wave just put together an animated visual of each processor generation in this video, bringing us to the present day.)
And now, it gets mind bending. If we suspend disbelief for a moment, and use D-Wave’s early data on processing power scaling (more on that below), then the very near future should be the watershed moment, where quantum computers surpass conventional computers and never look back. Moore’s Law cannot catch up. A year later, it outperforms all computers on Earth combined. Double qubits again the following year, and it outperforms the universe. What the???? you may ask... Meaning, it could solve certain problems that could not be solved by any non-quantum computer, even if the entire mass and energy of the universe was at its disposal and molded into the best possible computer.
It is a completely different way to compute — as David Deutsch posits — harnessing the refractive echoes of many trillions of parallel universes to perform a computation.
First the caveat (the text in white letters on the graph). D-Wave has not built a general-purpose quantum computer. Think of it as an application-specific processor, tuned to perform one task — solving discrete optimization problems. This happens to map to many real world applications, from finance to molecular modeling to machine learning, but it is not going to change our current personal computing tasks. In the near term, assume it will apply to scientific supercomputing tasks and commercial optimization tasks where a heuristic may suffice today, and perhaps it will be lurking in the shadows of an Internet giant’s data center improving image recognition and other forms of near-AI magic. In most cases, the quantum computer would be an accelerating coprocessor to a classical compute cluster.
Second, the assumptions. There is a lot of room for surprises in the next three years. Do they hit a scaling wall or discover a heretofore unknown fracturing of the physics… perhaps finding local entanglement, noise, or some other technical hitch that might not loom large at small scales, but grows exponentially as a problem just as the theoretical performance grows exponentially with scale. I think the risk is less likely to lie in the steady qubit march, which has held true for a decade now, but in the relationship of qubit count to performance.
There is also the question of the programming model. Until recently, programming a quantum computer was more difficult than machine coding an Intel processor. Imagine having to worry about everything from analog gate voltages to algorithmic transforms of programming logic to something native to quantum computing (Shor and Grover and some bright minds have made the occasional mathematical breakthrough on that front). With the application-specific quantum processor, D-Wave has made it all much easier, and with their forthcoming Black Box overlay, programming moves to a higher level of abstraction, like training a neural network with little understanding of the inner workings required.
In any case, the possibility of a curve like this begs many philosophical and cosmological questions about our compounding capacity to compute... the beginning of infinity if you will.
While it will be fascinating to see if the next three years play out like Rose’s prediction, for today, perhaps all we should say is that it’s not impossible. And what an interesting world this may be.
I took this photo of the latest hot lot of processor chips of various sizes at the spook shop summit (InQTel CEO Summit). Pretty shiny bling.
I am in the D-Wave board meeting now, and we just got a peek of next week's TIME Magazine cover (below). And it made the Charlie Rose show.
Here are some excerpts:
"The Quantum Quest for a Revolutionary Computer
The D-Wave Two is an unusual computer, and D-Wave is an unusual company. It's small, just 114 people, and its location puts it well outside the swim of Silicon Valley. But its investors include the storied Menlo Park, Calif., venture-capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which funded Skype and Tesla Motors. It's also backed by famously prescient Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and an outfit called In-Q-Tel, better known as the high-tech investment arm of the CIA. Likewise, D-Wave has very few customers, but they're blue-chip: they include the defense contractor Lockheed Martin; a computing lab that's hosted by NASA and largely funded by Google; and a U.S. intelligence agency that D-Wave executives decline to name.
The reason D-Wave has so few customers is that it makes a new type of computer called a quantum computer that's so radical and strange, people are still trying to figure out what it's for and how to use it. It could represent an enormous new source of computing power--it has the potential to solve problems that would take conventional computers centuries, with revolutionary consequences for fields ranging from cryptography to nanotechnology, pharmaceuticals to artificial intelligence.
That's the theory, anyway. Some critics, many of them bearing Ph.D.s and significant academic reputations, think D-Wave's machines aren't quantum computers at all. But D-Wave's customers buy them anyway, for around $10 million a pop, because if they're the real deal they could be the biggest leap forward since the invention of the microprocessor. …
Physicist David Deutsch once described quantum computing as "the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes." Not only is this excitingly weird, it's also incredibly useful. If a single quantum bit (or as they're inevitably called, qubits, pronounced cubits) can be in two states at the same time, it can perform two calculations at the same time. Two quantum bits could perform four simultaneous calculations; three quantum bits could perform eight; and so on. The power grows exponentially.
The supercooled niobium chip at the heart of the D-Wave Two has 512 qubits and therefore could in theory perform 2^512 operations simultaneously. That's more calculations than there are atoms in the universe, by many orders of magnitude. "This is not just a quantitative change," says Colin Williams, D-Wave's director of business development and strategic partnerships, who has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and once worked as Stephen Hawking's research assistant at Cambridge. "The kind of physical effects that our machine has access to are simply not available to supercomputers, no matter how big you make them. We're tapping into the fabric of reality in a fundamentally new way, to make a kind of computer that the world has never seen."
Naturally, a lot of people want one. This is the age of Big Data, and we're burying ourselves in information-- search queries, genomes, credit-card purchases, phone records, retail transactions, social media, geological surveys, climate data, surveillance videos, movie recommendations--and D-Wave just happens to be selling a very shiny new shovel. "Who knows what hedge-fund managers would do with one of these and the black-swan event that that might entail?" says Steve Jurvetson, one of the managing directors of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. "For many of the computational traders, it's an arms race."
One of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, published last month, revealed that the NSA has an $80 million quantum-computing project suggestively code-named Penetrating Hard Targets. Here's why: much of the encryption used online is based on the fact that it can take conventional computers years to find the factors of a number that is the product of two large primes. A quantum computer could do it so fast that it would render a lot of encryption obsolete overnight. You can see why the NSA would take an interest. …
For its first five years, the company existed as a think tank focused on research. Draper Fisher Jurvetson got onboard in 2003, viewing the business as a very sexy but very long shot. "I would put it in the same bucket as SpaceX and Tesla Motors," Jurvetson says, "where even the CEO Elon Musk will tell you that failure was the most likely outcome." By then Rose was ready to go from thinking about quantum computers to trying to build them--"we switched from a patent, IP, science aggregator to an engineering company," he says. Rose wasn't interested in expensive, fragile laboratory experiments; he wanted to build machines big enough to handle significant computing tasks and cheap and robust enough to be manufactured commercially. With that in mind, he and his colleagues made an important and still controversial decision.
Up until then, most quantum computers followed something called the gate-model approach, which is roughly analogous to the way conventional computers work, if you substitute qubits for transistors. But one of the things Rose had figured out in those early years was that building a gate-model quantum computer of any useful size just wasn't going to be feasible anytime soon. …
Adiabatic quantum computing may be technically simpler than the gate-model kind, but it comes with trade-offs. An adiabatic quantum computer can really solve only one class of problems, called discrete combinatorial optimization problems, which involve finding the best--the shortest, or the fastest, or the cheapest, or the most efficient--way of doing a given task.
This is great if you have a really hard discrete combinatorial optimization problem to solve. Not everybody does. But once you start looking for optimization problems, or at least problems that can be twisted around to look like optimization problems, you find them all over the place: in software design, tumor treatments, logistical planning, the stock market, airline schedules, the search for Earth-like planets in other solar systems, and in particular in machine learning.
Google and NASA, along with the Universities Space Research Association, jointly run something called the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or QuAIL, based at NASA Ames, which is the proud owner of a D-Wave Two. "If you're trying to do planning and scheduling for how you navigate the Curiosity rover on Mars or how you schedule the activities of astronauts on the station, these are clearly problems where a quantum computer--a computer that can optimally solve optimization problems--would be useful," says Rupak Biswas, deputy director of the Exploration Technology Directorate at NASA Ames. Google has been using its D-Wave to, among other things, write software that helps Google Glass tell the difference between when you're blinking and when you're winking.
Lockheed Martin turned out to have some optimization problems too. It produces a colossal amount of computer code, all of which has to be verified and validated for all possible scenarios, lest your F-35 spontaneously decide to reboot itself in midair. "It's very difficult to exhaustively test all of the possible conditions that can occur in the life of a system," says Ray Johnson, Lockheed Martin's chief technology officer. "Because of the ability to handle multiple conditions at one time through superposition, you're able to much more rapidly--orders of magnitude more rapidly--exhaustively test the conditions in that software." The company re-upped for a D-Wave Two last year.
Another challenge Rose and company face is that there is a small but nonzero number of academic physicists and computer scientists who think that they are partly or completely full of sh-t. Ever since D-Wave's first demo in 2007, snide humor, polite skepticism, impolite skepticism and outright debunkings have been lobbed at the company from any number of ivory towers. "There are many who in Round 1 of this started trash-talking D-Wave before they'd ever met the company," Jurvetson says. "Just the mere notion that someone is going to be building and shipping a quantum computer--they said, 'They are lying, and it's smoke and mirrors.'"
Seven years and many demos and papers later, the company isn't any less controversial. Any blog post or news story about D-Wave instantly grows a shaggy beard of vehement comments, both pro- and anti-. …
But where quantum computing is concerned, there always seems to be room for disagreement. Hartmut Neven, the director of engineering who runs Google's quantum-computing project, argues that the tests weren't a failure at all--that in one class of problem, the D-Wave Two outperformed the classical computers in a way that suggests quantum effects were in play. "There you see essentially what we were after," he says. "There you see an exponentially widening gap between simulated annealing and quantum annealing ... That's great news, but so far nobody has paid attention to it." Meanwhile, two other papers published in January make the case that a) D-Wave's chip does demonstrate entanglement and b) the test used the wrong kind of problem and was therefore meaningless anyway. For now pretty much everybody at least agrees that it's impressive that a chip as radically new as D-Wave's could even achieve parity with conventional hardware.
The attitude in D-Wave's C-suite toward all this back-and-forth is, unsurprisingly, dismissive. "The people that really understand what we're doing aren't skeptical," says Brownell. Rose is equally calm about it; all that wrestling must have left him with a thick skin. "Unfortunately," he says, "like all discourse on the Internet, it tends to be driven by a small number of people that are both vocal and not necessarily the most informed." He's content to let the products prove themselves, or not. "It's fine," he says. "It's good. Science progresses by rocking the ship. Things like this are a necessary component of forward progress."
Are D-Wave's machines quantum computers?
For now the answer is itself suspended, aptly enough, in a state of superposition, somewhere between yes and no. If the machines can do anything like what D-Wave is predicting, they won't leave many fields untouched. "I think we'll look back on the first time a quantum computer outperformed classical computing as a historic milestone," Brownell says. "It's a little grand, but we're kind of like Intel and Microsoft in 1977, at the dawn of a new computing era."
As machine intelligence compute architectures mimic the cortex, the fundamentals of a planar manufacturing process (semiconductors and the solid-state quantum computers of today) bring the interconnect constraint into sharp focus. Today, a cutting-edge chip has 10-13 layers of metal and 30 miles of wires (SemiEngineering). These are the interconnect lines, and if you want to map a 3D construct, like the cortex to an essentially flat chip, the problem is apparent when you consider that the average adult neuron connects to 1,000 others (and 10,000 as an infant). That 1000x synapse-to-neuron fanout means pure biomimicry of the brain implies ~1000 interconnect lines for each compute element.
Pictured here is D-Wave's latest quantum computer interconnect topology, called Pegasus (best seen in this animated GIF). They have evolved from nearest neighbor connectivity to the most-connected commercial system in the world, scaling to 5,000 qubits, as unveiled today (TechCrunch, HPCwire).
In-memory compute from Mythic and QML from D-Wave are already based on massively distributed, memory-centric architectures, much like the brain. I am still on the search for a disruptive breakthrough in interconnect, having first blogged about that as the conclusion here, 14 years ago, as D-Wave was just starting to scale up from their 2 to 4 qubit processor.
From my 2005 post:
“As a former chip designer, I kept thinking of comparisons between the different “memories” – those in our head and those in our computers. It seems that the developmental trajectory of electronics is recapitulating the evolutionary history of the brain. Specifically, both are saturating with a memory-centric architecture. Is this a fundamental attractor in computation and cognition? Might a conceptual focus on speedy computation be blinding us to a memory-centric approach to artificial intelligence? ….
Weaving these brain and semi industry threads together, the potential for intelligence in artificial systems is ripe for a Renaissance. Hawkins ends his book with a call to action: “now is the time to start building cortex-like memory systems. The human brain is not even close to the limit” of possibility.
Hawkins estimates that the memory size of the human brain is 8 terabytes, which is no longer beyond the reach of commercial technology. The issue though, is not the amount of memory, but the need for massive and dynamic interconnect. I would be interested to hear from anyone with solutions to the interconnect scaling problem. Biomimicry of the synapse, from sprouting to pruning, may be the missing link for the Renaissance.”
WND 4S5B1M Galaxy in exouniverse
Image credit: WANDER Space Probe / Navid Baraty
Big news! I’m excited to announce my new ongoing series of images taken by the WANDER space probe. WANDER (Wormhole Accelerated Nomad Delivering Exploratory Reconnaissance) is on a mission to explore beyond our universe and capture never-before-seen images of what exists in these strange worlds. WANDER travels by tunneling through wormholes, or “shortcuts” through spacetime. The wormholes are created from huge quantities of extremely dense matter in neutron stars and are filled with incredible amounts of negative energy harnessed from the vacuum of space. This negative energy holds the tunnel of the wormhole open long enough to be traversable.
With my technical background and knowledge of photography, I’m honored to have been selected as the lead image processor for the WANDER mission. WANDER uses special electronic detectors to record wavelengths of light throughout the range of the electromagnetic spectrum. This raw image data from WANDER is transmitted to Earth in the form of qubits (quantum bits) at nearly instantaneous speeds via quantum entanglement. My job is to analyze and edit this data to produce finished color images that accurately depict the grandeur of these universes.
On occasion, WANDER will be making observations in our universe as it periodically returns to Earth for routine maintenance.
This is the first-ever image from outside our universe taken by the WANDER spacecraft at the end of April.
Follow updates from WANDER on twitter and on facebook.
A special treat at the Age of AI conference yesterday... D-Wave brought a wafer full of their latest quantum processors. There are three different squares tiled across the wafer, with the same Washington architecture scaled to 500, 1000 and 2000 qubits. Each square chip is diced and connected via the wire bond pads that run along the periphery. It is then cooled to almost absolute zero (15 mili-Kelvin), and the niobium rings become superconductors in a state of quantum engagement. The rainbow of colors you see in these photos are iridescent thin-film effects, like a butterfly's wing, and serve as a poetic complement to the mind-bending physics of these processors, which harness the refractive echoes across trillions of parallel universes to compute in a fundamentally different way from any classical computer.
I served on the board for 17 years (2003 – 2020) and posted memories on flickr along the way. D-Wave is the only company building quantum annealing and gate-model quantum computers, and the farthest along in commercial development (the most system sales and cloud customers). They also have the most qubits (>5000) and, if all goes well, will trade with the ticker QBTS.
When I first invested, 19 years ago, it was on a $2.5M pre-money valuation. It was our first investment in Canada too. In retrospect, I was a wee bit early, as there were no competing quantum computing startups for many years that followed, but today, I am so proud to see this late-blooming unicorn heading to the public markets! Last year, I introduced D-Wave to Emil Michael’s SPAC and made the initial pitch, as Gen and I have also known him for many years.
• My Flickr photoblog posts on D-Wave
• TD Ameritrade interview of CEO Alan Baratz.
• A video I took of Google’s first D-Wave machine, a couple years prior to the Reuters photo above. Google purchased one of every quantum computer D-Wave made for almost a decade.
At D-Wave's Canadian headquarters for their Board meeting.
Closing in on the 19-year quest for quantum supremacy.
And more to come: D-Wave's soon to be announced Quadrant group is deploying Generative Learning for quantum computers to enable deep learning with less training data. Quadrant builds models of how data is generated and how labels are assigned so they can train accurate, discriminative models with less labeled data.
Loving the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer....thanks Chris for this hilarious collection of books.
When my son was in grade school, we loved Feynman's QED (quantum electrodynamics) in our bedtime book rotation. And now we have quantum board games and the Universe-Splitter app linked to CERN. But baby books? I think this is entertainment for the parents. :)
...while keeping your supercool… and harnessing the refractive echoes of many trillions of parallel universes engaged in the computation…
D-Wave’s quantum annealing paper came out in Nature today (here's a plain English summary).
“Fabricated using standard integrated circuit processes, the processors tested contained 128 superconducting flux qubits and 24,000 devices known as Josephson junctions, making them among the most complex superconducting circuits ever built. Designed to solve optimization and sampling problems, the processors have been successfully used in a variety of tasks including financial risk analysis, bioinformatics, affinity mapping and sentiment analysis, object recognition in images, medical imaging classification and compressed sensing.”
It also makes a wicked machine learning coprocessor, as shown by Google.
Image courtesy of D-Wave. The brilliant monitoring squares are comb-meanders, and the wiring spacing forms a diffraction grating tuned to a specific wavelength of light.
Cincinnati reveals the world's first sentient Quantum Computer artificial intelligence, the H.A.I.L.N.O. 9000. It aims to free us from much of our mundane thinking and planning so that we can focus on creating bigger and better things.
Don't worry. Although the cube-shaped supercomputer can think, choose, and create for itself, its self-learning algorithms for qubit processing have been programmed with a cardinal commandment: "Thou shalt not kill a human being." Besides, mankind holds the on-off switch to easily shut down its existence should something go wrong. This new intelligence knows this so it should behave. ;-)
[This is just in my imagination, sparked by this evening's art display in Cincinnati and probably watching too many science fiction movies. To my knowledge, there is no such A.I. yet, although private companies, investors, and governments are racing to create it.]
D-Wave brought a wafer full of their latest quantum processors to the Age of AI conference. There are three different squares tiled across the wafer, with the same Washington architecture scaled to 500, 1000 and 2000 qubits. Each square chip is diced and connected via the wire bond pads that run along the periphery. It is then cooled to almost absolute zero (15 mili-Kelvin), and the niobium rings become superconductors in a state of quantum engagement. The rainbow of colors you see in these photos are iridescent thin-film effects, like a butterfly's wing, and serve as a poetic complement to the mind-bending physics of these processors, which harness the refractive echoes across trillions of parallel universes to compute in a fundamentally different way from any classical computer.
WND CS33B1 spiral galaxy
Image credit: WANDER Space Probe / Navid Baraty
Big news! I’m excited to announce my new ongoing series of images taken by the WANDER space probe. WANDER (Wormhole Accelerated Nomad Delivering Exploratory Reconnaissance) is on a mission to explore beyond our universe and capture never-before-seen images of what exists in these strange worlds. WANDER travels by tunneling through wormholes, or “shortcuts” through spacetime. The wormholes are created from huge quantities of extremely dense matter in neutron stars and are filled with incredible amounts of negative energy harnessed from the vacuum of space. This negative energy holds the tunnel of the wormhole open long enough to be traversable.
With my technical background and knowledge of photography, I’m honored to have been selected as the lead image processor for the WANDER mission. WANDER uses special electronic detectors to record wavelengths of light throughout the range of the electromagnetic spectrum. This raw image data from WANDER is transmitted to Earth in the form of qubits (quantum bits) at nearly instantaneous speeds via quantum entanglement. My job is to analyze and edit this data to produce finished color images that accurately depict the grandeur of these universes.
On occasion, WANDER will be making observations in our universe as it periodically returns to Earth for routine maintenance.
Follow updates from WANDER on twitter and on facebook.
In the D-Wave Board meeting in Canada this morning. Today's news: Google buys a quantum computer for machine learning and artificial intelligence: "We actually think quantum machine learning may provide the most creative problem-solving process under the known laws of physics." — Google Blog
This is an interesting development in a larger trend I call Deus Ex Machina — machine learning innervates everything.
Under the covers, just about every new research initiative at Google is driven by machine learning — whereby the machine learns patterns in the data without explicit models or traditional solution design. It’s what makes “Big Data” BIG this time around. The approach requires a humble relaxation of the presumption of control, and so it starts with companies like Google and eventually revolutionizes all businesses, even those with a delusion of control, like Investment bankers. =)
As a precondition to purchase, Google gave the company a number of performance benchmarks to prove that the quantum computer is faster than anything Google has in house. The NYT reports:
“For most problems, it was 11,000 times faster, but in the more difficult 50 percent, it was 33,000 times faster. In the top 25 percent, it was 50,000 times faster.”
"The machine Google and NASA will use makes use of the interactions of 512 quantum bits, or qubits, to determine optimization. They plan to upgrade the machine to 2,048 qubits when this becomes available, probably within the next year or two. That machine could be exponentially more powerful."
This is the core of a new quantum computer attached to Leiden Cryogenics dilution fridge, ready to begin a cool down to 0.005 degrees above absolute zero… about 500x colder than the coldest place in remote outer space..
For those who missed the earlier puzzle, the Canadians at D-Wave Systems plan to unveil it on Feb 13...
This quantum computer employs the resources of 65,536 parallel universes to compute answers in a fundamentally new way.
And this is just the beginning. There appears to be a Moore’s Law-like doubling in the number of solid state entangled qubits over time. It is early still, like when Moore made his first observation in 1965.
I first became interested in quantum computing when I read Oxford Professor David Deutsch’s Fabric of Reality: "quantum computers can efficiently render every physically possible quantum environment, even when vast numbers of universes are interacting. Quantum computers can also efficiently solve certain mathematical problems, such as factorization, which are classically intractable, and can implement types of cryptography which are classically impossible. Quantum computation is a qualitatively new way of harnessing nature." (p.221)
Or from my first blog on the subject: “Quantum computers have the potential to solve problems that would take a classical computer longer than the age of the universe.”
At DE Shaw today, with QCWare. He opened with my 120-year Moore’s Law abstraction slide (which updates the Ray Kurzweil original with the latest processors).
Some choice quotes (his slides are here):
A quantum computer could challenge the Church-Turing thesis itself, and that could be as important in physics as discovering the Higgs Boson or gravitational waves. And it has practical applications too. That’s a bonus.
Quantum mechanics is probability theory with minus signs.
Quantum mechanics is very simple once you take the physics out of it. Quantum information theory is a level below physics. It’s the operating system that the rest of physics runs on. General relativity has not loaded yet.
Superposition is something qubits like to do in private.
I have high confidence in the possibility of a quantum speedup. With quantum simulation, we may see a speedup before we have a full programmable universal quantum computer.
For an exponential quantum speedup you have to choreograph an interference pattern that boosts the amplitude of the right answer.
In 1994, Shor proved that factoring integers is in BQP (Bounded Quantum Polynomial time). You can find periods of periodic functions that repeat with very long periods. This works for discrete logarithms and breaks all public key crypto including elliptic curve.
Factoring integers is like period-finding, a Fourier transform on large vectors. A Fourier transform creates a kind of interference pattern, constructive when in sync with the period and destructive out of sync.
In 1995 Grover showed that if you do a unstructured search of a giant list with a quantum computer, you can get a sqrt-n speedup but not more than that.
If you want a fast quantum algorithm for NP-complete problems, you need to take advantage of structure somehow, versus brute-force search.
D-Wave’s quantum annealing is a non-zero temperature version of the adiabatic algorithm.
I want a quantum computer to disprove people who say it’s impossible.
Today's MIT Tech Review opening seems like a good prompt to tell the story of the D-Wave Orion that adorns our office:
"Inside a blocky building in a Vancouver suburb is a place chilled colder than anywhere in the natural universe. Inside that is a computer processor that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the CIA's investment arm, In-Q-Tel, believe can tap the quirks of quantum mechanics to unleash more computing power than any conventional computer chip.
If the bet works out, some of the world's thorniest computing problems, such as the hunt for new drugs or efforts to build artificial intelligence, would become dramatically less challenging.
D-Wave's supercooled processor is designed to handle what software engineers call "optimization" problems, the core of conundrums such as figuring out the most efficient delivery route, or how the atoms in a protein will move around when it meets a drug compound. "Virtually everything has to do with optimization, and it's the bedrock of machine learning, which underlies virtually all the wealth creation on the Internet," says Geordie Rose, D-Wave's founder and chief technology officer."
So with that preamble, let me share the story of this artifact (and detailed photos below), with huge thanks to Murray, our historical scribe and Research Engineer at D-Wave:
"The ORION-IO project was a lot of fun and all the more remarkable in the context of the quantum computing processor, fabrication, and software development that were taking place with it. In 2007 it became somewhat emblematic of the complexity and teamwork that were characteristic of the whole quantum computing system.
The technical specifications and contextual history are more rich than can be captured in a short summary, but I’ve tried to provide some design notes that tell elements of the story.
ORION-IO Design Notes:
[Component Elements]
i.Wiring from room temperature to 20mK
ii.The Lumped-Element-Filter (LEF) bank in a plate stack.
iii.The Copper-Powder-Filter (CPF) bank in a honeycomb bar
iv.The Chip Packaging and Pedestal Mount
[Time]
The ORION-IO project kicked-off with defining requirements in May 2006. The first 16 qubit chip was installed and cooled in an ORION-IO assembly on Nov 21st, 6.5 months later. Before the end of 2006 Mike Simmonds, then VP of Quantum Design (a cryogenics equipment manufacturer), visited and reviewed the design. He proposed a 1-year project to do an iteration on the system, not knowing that we had built the original in almost half that time.
[Temperature]
The entire ORION-IO system operates at ~20mK (0.020K) with the quantum processor (save for the top section of wiring.) That's more than 100X colder than interstellar space -- 2.725K for the cosmic microwave background radiation. There are no known processes in the Universe that can achieve temperatures that cold. So unless there is other intelligent life somewhere in space, this assembly was the coldest place in the Universe during it's working life.
[Space]
The ORION-IO was tightly space constrained. The assembly had a 2mm vacuum gap around the LEF plates and a 5mm vacuum gap off of its end.
[Resistance]
The quantum processors that mounted in the ORION-IO system had all superconducting circuitry. To support quantum computation at 20mK all of the wiring in the ORION-IO assembly had to be superconducting as well. This included printed circuit boards, wire bond pads, solder contacts, connectors, wires, and filters.
[Filtering]
The filters in the ORION-IO are low-pass filters with a 3MHz cut-off frequency. The noise above the signal bandwidth is severely attenuated for a cryogenic environment. The strongest attenuation begins at 6GHz when the noise power is attenuated 1 Billion Billion times (10^-18). There are no resistive losses on the signal path.
[Chip Packaging]
The aluminum plates around the chip serve as a superconducting shield that freeze the remnant magnetic field in place around the processor. However superconducting aluminum is an extremely poor thermal conductor. To reduce the cool-down time from days to hours, the printed circuit board (PCB) is bolted to a copper under-plate with 12 gold-plated copper screws. The PCB itself has gold and tin plating on the surface metal layer as well as superconducting traces on its inner wire layer. At each edge are non-magnetic, superconducting contact pins that must mate with any ORION-IO filtering assembly. One additional concern is that each assembly must manage multiple 300K temperature cycles. This combination of constraints made the chip packaging the most challenging section to design.
[Vacuum Annealing]
Most of the mechanical parts are made out of high-purity Oxygen-free copper. The heaviest copper parts were vacuum annealed to remove Hydrogen that gets captured in the metal during Oxygen removal (Hydrogen goes through a state transition at low-Temperatures that slows cool-down). The annealing creates large domain crystals in the metal that you can see on the surface under the gold plating.
[Dry Mechanical Joints]
There are 12 plate-to-plate joints in the ORION-IO assembly between the fridge and the chip packaging. The gold plating prevents oxidation on the surface of the copper that would reduce thermal conductivity at these interfaces. All of these mechanical joints are dry contacts between mirror-polished plates. These joints were the first of their kind and went against standard practice amongst low-temperature designers. Ultimately the final performance proved the design.
[State of the Art]
Cooling chips to 20mK is one thing. Cooling the electrons in the superconducting circuitry is another thing altogether. To characterize the D-Wave quantum processors the electron temperature had to be measured in the circuitry. Temperatures as low as 17mK were observed. By comparison, a research team at MIT was reporting electron temperatures of 80-90mK in their superconducting quantum circuits (results quoted are circa 2007).
[Mask Generations Tested]
The ORION-IO was one of the longer lasting IO designs at D-Wave. It was used in tests of all of the following mask generations over 5 years:
•Vesuvius
•Shasta
•Rainier
•Quaoar
•Pushkin
•Oberon
•Nacimiento
•Metis
•Leda
•Kalyke
•Iapetus
•Hyperion
•Ganymede
•Phobos II
•Phobos
•Europa II
[Notable Results]
During the course of quantum processor development on ORION-IO systems, some of the more notable results obtained include the following:
• 16-qubit QC demo in Mountain View, CA and Vancouver; Feb 2007
• 28-qubit Demo at HPC conference; Nov 2007
• Geometrical dependence of the low-frequency noise in superconducting flux qubits; Phys Rev B.; T. Lanting et al.
• 52-qubit Google Demo, Nov 2009
• A lot of photography that became marketing material, and some of the artwork lining the D-Wave hallways [and DFJ conference rooms]
[Art and Design Concept]
The design of the ORION-IO was largely determined by the tight space constraints -- 110 filtered lines plus a quantum chip in roughly the space of a bread pan. The filtering attenuation was very large at frequencies where electromagnetic noise can pass through tiny apertures; so the output of the filters had to be carefully isolated from their input. This is where the dry, mirror-polished joints in the body served double-duty for high thermal conductivity and excellent electrical isolation.
The cylindrical concept was to keep the noisy space outside the cylinder, and the clean signals at the center. With each plate in the stack enclosing a narrow channel for all of the filters in the plate beneath.
There was little freedom for artistic choices although the one notable exception was the colour of the printed circuit boards, each chosen to complement the colour of the metal surfaces around it.
[No Room For Error]
The design for ORION was based on scaling the 23-line ARIES-IO system. The perceived risk of failed lines was substantial, so multiple redundancies were designed into the stages of the system to allow for possible failures (the system was designed as a single module, once constructed). The maximum line yield for an ORION-IO system was 128 lines. The first ORION-IO came online with 126/128 line yield. After final assembly the system passed all operational tests on its first cool down. Over their lifetime the highest yield of the four systems built was 128, the lowest was 122.
Today D-Wave announced the world's first quantum computer with over 5,000 qubits (quantum bits). Qubit count is one of the metrics of a quantum computer's computational power, which grows dramatically with the number of qubits. I have been tracking the frontier of quantum computing from the beginning, and this is the updated semi-log graph (where a straight line is an exponential curve).
When I first invested in quantum computing in 2003, D-Wave founder Geordie Rose had one working qubit, and he predicted that he would be able to demonstrate a two-bit quantum computer within 6 months. There was a certain precision to his predictions. He went on to suggest that the number of qubits in a scalable quantum computing architecture should double every year. It sounded a lot like Gordon Moore’s prediction back in 1965, when he extrapolated from just five data points on a log-scale. So, I called it “Rose’s Law” and that seemed to amuse him. (more photo-blog links in comments below)
In 1965, the original Moore's Law paper predicted an annual doubling of transistor counts, but ten years later, Moore revised his “law” to every 24 months. With a little hand waving, most reports today attribute 18 months to Moore’s Law, but there is quite a bit of variability.
Rose’s Law bears an uncanny resemblance. It followed an annual doubling for the first decade, and now seems to be following a biennial doubling over the past seven years to the present day. Now, let me caution that adding a segmented overlay analysis to a scatter plot is ripe for interpretive bias. There is no specific reason for 2013 to be a breakpoint in the slope. We could alternatively plot a best-fit line through all 17 years, and it would have roughly an 18-month doubling time. So, time will tell. With a few more product releases from D-Wave, we’ll see how closely Rose’s Law recapitulates Moore’s Law in the quantum computing domain. D-Wave has been the dramatic leader in qubit count throughout the 17 years, much like Intel was in the early days of Moore’s Law (before handing the baton to NVIDIA).
With today’s 5K qubit announcement (the quantum Advantage computer), D-Wave’s CEO Alan Baratz emphasized their leadership position and scalability:
"There is no other quantum computer anywhere in the world that can solve problems at the scale and complexity that this quantum computer can solve problems. It really is the only one that you can run real business applications on." — VentureBeat
“With over twice the number of qubits, with over twice the connectivity, with over five times the number of devices on the superconducting chip, we’re still able to program it in the same amount of time, read out in the same amount of time, run it at the same temperature — which means we’re able to continue scaling the technology. This is a really important point because, over the years, there have been various so-called experts who have said that the D-Wave technology just wouldn’t scale. And yet, we’re the only quantum computing technology that has scaled.”
And a more technical dive in Ars Technica: "What's it take to make a chip with over a million Josephson junctions?" and details on the D-Wave quantum annealer and programing model.
Full disclosure: I served on the board for the first 17 years, and shared a lot of photos here on flickr
The D-Wave team toured the installation at NASA today. The red badges are for the visitors from Canada.
(More photos below... and walk-in video of our first sight of the new machine.)
"We actually think quantum machine learning may provide the most creative problem-solving process under the known laws of physics." — Google Blog
"the system will be the most powerful in the world, with approximately 512 superconducting flux qubits"
— NASA's Quantum AI Lab
"Quantum computing is based on quantum bits or qubits. Unlike traditional computers, in which bits must have a value of either zero or one, a qubit can represent a zero, a one, or both values simultaneously. Representing information in qubits allows the information to be processed in ways that have no equivalent in classical computing, taking advantage of phenomena such as quantum tunneling and quantum entanglement. As such, quantum computers may theoretically be able to solve certain problems in a few days that would take millions of years on a classical computer." — NASA QuAIL
I photographed my copy of the book on my kitchen counter in Tucson, Arizona
In Schrödinger's cat experiment, a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source connected to a Geiger counter are placed in a sealed box. As illustrated, the objects are in a state of superposition: the cat is both alive and dead.
In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment that illustrates a paradox of quantum superposition. In the thought experiment, a hypothetical cat may be considered simultaneously both alive and dead, while it is unobserved in a closed box, as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur. This thought experiment was devised by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935[1] in a discussion with Albert Einstein[2] to illustrate what Schrödinger saw as the problems of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
In Schrödinger's original formulation, a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor (e.g. a Geiger counter) detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation implies that, after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality resolves into one possibility or the other.
Though originally a critique on the Copenhagen interpretation, Schrödinger's seemingly paradoxical thought experiment became part of the foundation of quantum mechanics. The scenario is often featured in theoretical discussions of the interpretations of quantum mechanics, particularly in situations involving the measurement problem. The experiment is not intended to be actually performed on a cat, but rather as an easily understandable illustration of the behavior of atoms. As a result, Schrödinger's cat has had enduring appeal in popular culture. Experiments at the atomic scale have been carried out, showing that very small objects may be superimposed; superimposing an object as large as a cat would pose considerable technical difficulties.
Fundamentally, the Schrödinger's cat experiment asks how long superpositions last and when (or whether) they collapse. Interpretations for resolving this question include that the cat is dead or alive when the box is opened (Copenhagen); that a conscious mind must observe the box (Von Neumann–Wigner); that upon observation, the universe branches into one universe where the cat is alive and another one where it is dead (many-worlds); that every object (such as the cat, and the box itself) is an observer, but superposition is relative depending on the observer (relational); that superposition never truly exists due to time-travelling waves (transactional); that merely observing the box either slows or accelerates the cat's death (quantum Zeno effect); among other theories that assert that the cat is dead or alive long before the box is opened. It is unclear which interpretation is correct; the underlying issue raised by Schrödinger's cat remains an unsolved problem in physics.
Origin And Motivation
Schrödinger intended his thought experiment as a discussion of the EPR article—named after its authors Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen—in 1935.[3][4] The EPR article highlighted the counterintuitive nature of quantum superpositions, in which a quantum system such as an atom or photon can exist as a combination of multiple states corresponding to different possible outcomes.
The prevailing theory, called the Copenhagen interpretation, says that a quantum system remains in superposition until it interacts with, or is observed by, the external world. When this happens, the superposition collapses into one or another of the possible definite states. The EPR experiment shows that a system with multiple particles separated by large distances can be in such a superposition. Schrödinger and Einstein exchanged letters about Einstein's EPR article, in the course of which Einstein pointed out that the state of an unstable keg of gunpowder will, after a while, contain a superposition of both exploded and unexploded states.[4]
To further illustrate, Schrödinger described how one could, in principle, create a superposition in a large-scale system by making it dependent on a quantum particle that was in a superposition. He proposed a scenario with a cat in a locked steel chamber, wherein the cat's life or death depended on the state of a radioactive atom, whether it had decayed and emitted radiation or not. According to Schrödinger, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead until the state has been observed. Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-live cats as a serious possibility; on the contrary, he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics.[1]
Since Schrödinger's time, various interpretations of the mathematics of quantum mechanics have been advanced by physicists, some of which regard the "alive and dead" cat superposition as quite real, others do not.[5][6] Intended as a critique of the Copenhagen interpretation (the prevailing orthodoxy in 1935), the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment remains a touchstone for modern interpretations of quantum mechanics and can be used to illustrate and compare their strengths and weaknesses.[7]
Thought experiment
Schrödinger wrote: [1][8]
One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives. if meanwhile, no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naïvely accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.
Schrödinger's famous thought experiment poses the question, "When does a quantum system stop existing as a superposition of states and become one or the other?" (More technically, when does the actual quantum state stop being a non-trivial linear combination of states, each of which resembles different classical states, and instead begin to have a unique classical description?) If the cat survives, it remembers only being alive. But explanations of the EPR experiments that are consistent with standard microscopic quantum mechanics require that macroscopic objects, such as cats and notebooks, do not always have unique classical descriptions. The thought experiment illustrates this apparent paradox. Our intuition says that no observer can be in more than one state simultaneously—yet the cat, it seems from the thought experiment, can be in such a condition. Is the cat required to be an observer, or does its existence in a single well-defined classical state require another external observer? Each alternative seemed absurd to Einstein, who was impressed by the ability of the thought experiment to highlight these issues. In a letter to Schrödinger dated 1950, he wrote:
You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality, if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality — reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.[9]
Note that the charge of gunpowder is not mentioned in Schrödinger's setup, which uses a Geiger counter as an amplifier and hydrocyanic poison instead of gunpowder. The gunpowder had been mentioned in Einstein's original suggestion to Schrödinger 15 years before, and Einstein carried it forward to the present discussion.[4]
Interpretations
Since Schrödinger's time, other interpretations of quantum mechanics have been proposed that give different answers to the questions posed by Schrödinger's cat of how long superpositions last and when (or whether) they collapse.
Copenhagen interpretation
Main article: Copenhagen interpretation
A commonly held interpretation of quantum mechanics is the Copenhagen interpretation.[10] In the Copenhagen interpretation, a system stops being a superposition of states and becomes either one or the other when an observation takes place. This thought experiment makes apparent the fact that the nature of measurement, or observation, is not well-defined in this interpretation. The experiment can be interpreted to mean that while the box is closed, the system simultaneously exists in a superposition of the states "decayed nucleus/dead cat" and "undecayed nucleus/living cat" and that only when the box is opened and an observation performed does the wave function collapse into one of the two states.
Von Neumann interpretation
Main article: Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation
In 1932, John von Neumann described in his book Mathematical Foundations a pattern where the radioactive source is observed by a device, which itself is observed by another device and so on. It makes no difference in the predictions of quantum theory where along this chain of causal effects the superposition collapses.[11] This potentially infinite chain could be broken if the last device is replaced by a conscious observer. This solved the problem because it was claimed that an individual's consciousness cannot be multiple.[12] Neumann asserted that a conscious observer is necessary for collapse to one or the other (e.g., either a live cat or a dead cat) of the terms on the right-hand side of a wave function. This interpretation was later adopted by Eugene Wigner, who then rejected the interpretation in a thought experiment known as Wigner's friend.[13]
Wigner supposed that a friend opened the box and observed the cat without telling anyone. From Wigner's conscious perspective, the friend is now part of the wave function and has seen a live cat and seen a dead cat. To a third person's conscious perspective, Wigner himself becomes part of the wave function once Wigner learns the outcome from the friend. This could be extended indefinitely.[13]
Bohr's interpretation
One of the main scientists associated with the Copenhagen interpretation, Niels Bohr, offered an interpretation that is independent of a subjective observer-induced collapse of the wave function, or of measurement; instead, an "irreversible" or effectively irreversible process causes the decay of quantum coherence, which imparts the classical behavior of "observation" or "measurement".[14][15][16][17] Thus, Schrödinger's cat would be either dead or alive long before the box is observed.[18]
A resolution of the paradox is that the triggering of the Geiger counter counts as a measurement of the state of the radioactive substance. Because a measurement has already occurred deciding the state of the cat, the subsequent observation by a human records only what has already occurred.[19] Analysis of an actual experiment by Roger Carpenter and A. J. Anderson found that measurement alone (for example by a Geiger counter) is sufficient to collapse a quantum wave function before any human knows of the result.[20] The apparatus indicates one of two colors depending on the outcome. The human observer sees which color is indicated, but they don't consciously know which outcome the color represents. A second human, the one who set up the apparatus, is told of the color and becomes conscious of the outcome, and the box is opened to check if the outcome matches.[11] However, it is disputed whether merely observing the color counts as a conscious observation of the outcome.[21]
Many-worlds interpretation and consistent histories
Main article: Many-worlds interpretation
In 1957, Hugh Everett formulated the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which does not single out observation as a special process. In the many-worlds interpretation, both alive and dead states of the cat persist after the box is opened, but are decoherent from each other. In other words, when the box is opened, the observer and the possibly dead cat split into an observer looking at a box with a dead cat and an observer looking at a box with a live cat. But since the dead and alive states are decoherent, there is no effective communication or interaction between them.
When opening the box, the observer becomes entangled with the cat, so "observer states" corresponding to the cat's being alive and dead are formed; each observer state is entangled, or linked, with the cat so that the observation of the cat's state and the cat's state correspond with each other. Quantum decoherence ensures that the different outcomes have no interaction with each other. The same mechanism of quantum decoherence is also important for the interpretation in terms of consistent histories. Only the "dead cat" or the "live cat" can be a part of a consistent history in this interpretation. Decoherence is generally considered to prevent simultaneous observation of multiple states.[22][23]
A variant of the Schrödinger's cat experiment, known as the quantum suicide machine, has been proposed by cosmologist Max Tegmark. It examines the Schrödinger's cat experiment from the point of view of the cat, and argues that by using this approach, one may be able to distinguish between the Copenhagen interpretation and many-worlds.
Ensemble interpretation
The ensemble interpretation states that superpositions are nothing but subensembles of a larger statistical ensemble. The state vector would not apply to individual cat experiments, but only to the statistics of many similarly prepared cat experiments. Proponents of this interpretation state that this makes the Schrödinger's cat paradox a trivial matter, or a non-issue.
This interpretation serves to discard the idea that a single physical system in quantum mechanics has a mathematical description that corresponds to it in any way.[24]
Relational interpretation
The relational interpretation makes no fundamental distinction between the human experimenter, the cat, and the apparatus or between animate and inanimate systems; all are quantum systems governed by the same rules of wavefunction evolution, and all may be considered "observers". But the relational interpretation allows that different observers can give different accounts of the same series of events, depending on the information they have about the system.[25] The cat can be considered an observer of the apparatus; meanwhile, the experimenter can be considered another observer of the system in the box (the cat plus the apparatus). Before the box is opened, the cat, by nature of its being alive or dead, has information about the state of the apparatus (the atom has either decayed or not decayed); but the experimenter does not have information about the state of the box contents. In this way, the two observers simultaneously have different accounts of the situation: To the cat, the wavefunction of the apparatus has appeared to "collapse"; to the experimenter, the contents of the box appear to be in superposition. Not until the box is opened, and both observers have the same information about what happened, do both system states appear to "collapse" into the same definite result, a cat that is either alive or dead.
Transactional interpretation
In the transactional interpretation, the apparatus emits an advanced wave backward in time, which combined with the wave that the source emits forward in time, forms a standing wave. The waves are seen as physically real, and the apparatus is considered an "observer". In the transactional interpretation, the collapse of the wavefunction is "atemporal" and occurs along the whole transaction between the source and the apparatus. The cat is never in superposition. Rather the cat is only in one state at any particular time, regardless of when the human experimenter looks in the box. The transactional interpretation resolves this quantum paradox.[26]
Zeno effects
The Zeno effect is known to cause delays to any changes from the initial state.
On the other hand, the anti-Zeno effect accelerates the changes. For example, if you peek a look into the cat box frequently you may either cause delays to the fateful choice or, conversely, accelerate it. Both the Zeno effect and the anti-Zeno effect are real and known to happen to real atoms. The quantum system being measured must be strongly coupled to the surrounding environment (in this case to the apparatus, the experiment room ... etc.) in order to obtain more accurate information. But while there is no information passed to the outside world, it is considered to be a quasi-measurement, but as soon as the information about the cat's well-being is passed on to the outside world (by peeking into the box) quasi-measurement turns into measurement. Quasi-measurements, like measurements, cause the Zeno effects.[27]
Zeno effects teach us that even without peeking into the box, the death of the cat would have been delayed or accelerated anyway due to its environment.
Objective collapse theories
According to objective collapse theories, superpositions are destroyed spontaneously (irrespective of external observation) when some objective physical threshold (of time, mass, temperature, irreversibility, etc.) is reached. Thus, the cat would be expected to have settled into a definite state long before the box is opened. This could loosely be phrased as "the cat observes itself" or "the environment observes the cat".
Objective collapse theories require a modification of standard quantum mechanics to allow superpositions to be destroyed by the process of time evolution.[28] These theories could ideally be tested by creating mesoscopic superposition states in the experiment. For instance, energy cat states has been proposed as a precise detector of the quantum gravity related energy decoherence models.[29]
Applications and tests
Schrödinger's cat quantum superposition of states and effect of the environment through decoherence
The experiment as described is a purely theoretical one, and the machine proposed is not known to have been constructed. However, successful experiments involving similar principles, e.g. superpositions of relatively large (by the standards of quantum physics) objects have been performed.[30][better source needed] These experiments do not show that a cat-sized object can be superposed, but the known upper limit on "cat states" has been pushed upwards by them. In many cases the state is short-lived, even when cooled to near absolute zero.
A "cat state" has been achieved with photons.[31]
A beryllium ion has been trapped in a superposed state.[32]
An experiment involving a superconducting quantum interference device ("SQUID") has been linked to the theme of the thought experiment: "The superposition state does not correspond to a billion electrons flowing one way and a billion others flowing the other way. Superconducting electrons move en masse. All the superconducting electrons in the SQUID flow both ways around the loop at once when they are in the Schrödinger's cat state."[33]
A piezoelectric "tuning fork" has been constructed, which can be placed into a superposition of vibrating and non-vibrating states. The resonator comprises about 10 trillion atoms.[34]
An experiment involving a flu virus has been proposed.[35]
An experiment involving a bacterium and an electromechanical oscillator has been proposed.[36]
In quantum computing the phrase "cat state" sometimes refers to the GHZ state, wherein several qubits are in an equal superposition of all being 0 and all being 1; e.g.,
|\psi \rangle ={\frac {1}{\sqrt {2}}}{\bigg (}|00\ldots 0\rangle +|11\ldots 1\rangle {\bigg )}.
According to at least one proposal, it may be possible to determine the state of the cat before observing it.[37][38]
Extensions
Prominent physicists have gone so far as to suggest that astronomers observing dark energy in the universe in 1998 may have "reduced its life expectancy" through a pseudo-Schrödinger's cat scenario, although this is a controversial viewpoint.[39][40]
In August 2020, physicists presented studies involving interpretations of quantum mechanics that are related to the Schrödinger's cat and Wigner's friend paradoxes, resulting in conclusions that challenge seemingly established assumptions about reality.[41][42][43]
See also
iconPhysics portal
Basis function
Complementarity (physics)
Double-slit experiment
Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester
Heisenberg cut
Modal realism
Observer effect (physics)
Schroedinbug
Schrödinger's cat in popular culture
References
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Further reading
Einstein, Albert; Podolsky, Boris; Rosen, Nathan (15 May 1935). "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?". Physical Review. 47 (10): 777–780. Bibcode:1935PhRv...47..777E. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.47.777.none
Leggett, Tony (August 2000). "New Life for Schrödinger's Cat" (PDF). Physics World. pp. 23–24. Retrieved 28 February 2020.none An article on experiments with "cat state" superpositions in superconducting rings, in which the electrons go around the ring in two directions simultaneously.
Trimmer, John D. (1980). "The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödinger's "Cat Paradox" Paper". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 124 (5): 323–338. JSTOR 986572.none(registration required)
Yam, Phillip (October 9, 2012). "Bringing Schrödinger's Cat to Life". Scientific American. Retrieved 28 February 2020. A description of investigations of quantum "cat states" and wave function collapse by Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland, for which they won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Kalmbach, Gudrun (1983). Orthomodular Lattices. Academic Press.
As part of a traveling marketing and awareness initiative, the cooling and qubit / detector core of an IBM Q quantum computer was brought to IBM Research in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.
This engineering beauty looks just like a scifi prop.
Geordie Rose on stage at the Computer History Musem as data streams into the quantum computer…
Geordie showed three demos running on the 16 qubit computer back in Burnaby. The machine is targeted at a broad class of optimization problems and parametric database search.
The Register (U.K.) published the first report from the floor that I could find. TV coverage should air on NBC tonight (Bay Area I presume) at around 6:15pm.
One funny story from the Q&A: A fellow stood up and pointed to me and confessed that he saw the photo I posted on flickr, with the visual comparison to the La Scala opera house in Milan. That was Sunday. So on Monday, he called Lufthansa, and flew out from Milan to make the event Tuesday morning.
SBC-1 Globular cluster
Image credit: WANDER Space Probe / Navid Baraty
Big news! I’m excited to announce my new ongoing series of images taken by the WANDER space probe. WANDER (Wormhole Accelerated Nomad Delivering Exploratory Reconnaissance) is on a mission to explore beyond our universe and capture never-before-seen images of what exists in these strange worlds. WANDER travels by tunneling through wormholes, or “shortcuts” through spacetime. The wormholes are created from huge quantities of extremely dense matter in neutron stars and are filled with incredible amounts of negative energy harnessed from the vacuum of space. This negative energy holds the tunnel of the wormhole open long enough to be traversable.
With my technical background and knowledge of photography, I’m honored to have been selected as the lead image processor for the WANDER mission. WANDER uses special electronic detectors to record wavelengths of light throughout the range of the electromagnetic spectrum. This raw image data from WANDER is transmitted to Earth in the form of qubits (quantum bits) at nearly instantaneous speeds via quantum entanglement. My job is to analyze and edit this data to produce finished color images that accurately depict the grandeur of these universes.
On occasion, WANDER will be making observations in our universe as it periodically returns to Earth for routine maintenance.
Follow updates from WANDER on twitter and on facebook.
At D-Wave's Canadian headquarters for their Board meeting.
Closing in on the 19-year quest for quantum supremacy.
And more to come: D-Wave's soon to be announced Quadrant group is deploying Generative Learning for quantum computers to enable deep learning with less training data. Quadrant builds models of how data is generated and how labels are assigned so they can train accurate, discriminative models with less labeled data.