RSS Feed Source: MIT Technology Review

Amazon Web Services today announced Ocelot, its first-generation quantum computing chip. While the chip has only rudimentary computing capability, the company says it is a proof-of-principle demonstration—a step on the path to creating a larger machine that can deliver on the industry’s promised killer applications, such as fast and accurate simulations of new battery materials.

“This is a first prototype that demonstrates that this architecture is scalable and hardware-efficient,” says Oskar Painter, the head of quantum hardware at AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing unit. In particular, the company says its approach makes it simpler to perform error correction, a key technical challenge in the development of quantum computing.  

Ocelot consists of nine quantum bits, or qubits, on a chip about a centimeter square, which, like some forms of quantum hardware, must be cryogenically cooled to near absolute zero in order to operate. Five of the

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RSS Feed Source: MIT Technology Review

Microsoft announced today that it has made significant progress in its 20-year quest to make topological quantum bits, or qubits—a special approach to building quantum computers that could make them more stable and easier to scale up. 

Researchers and companies have been working for years to build quantum computers, which could unlock dramatic new abilities to simulate complex materials and discover new ones, among many other possible applications. 

To achieve that potential, though, we must build big enough systems that are stable enough to perform computations. Many of the technologies being explored today, such as the superconducting qubits pursued by Google and IBM, are so delicate that the resulting systems need to have many extra qubits to correct errors. 

Microsoft has long been working on an alternative that could cut down on the overhead by using components that are far more stable. These components,

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RSS Feed Source: MIT Technology Review

In trying to make sense of the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE, it may be helpful to think about the Evil Housekeeper Problem. It’s a principle of computer security roughly stating that once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop, all bets are off. Because the intruder has physical access, you are in much more trouble. And the person demanding to get into your computer may be standing right beside you.

So who is going to stop the evil housekeeper from plugging a computer in and telling IT staff to connect it to the network?

What happens if someone comes in and tells you that you’ll be fired unless you reveal the authenticator code from your phone, or sign off on a code change, or turn over your PIV card, the Homeland Security–approved smart card used to

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RSS Feed Source: MIT Technology Review

A Canadian startup called Xanadu has built a new quantum computer it says can be easily scaled up to achieve the computational power needed to tackle scientific challenges ranging from drug discovery to more energy-efficient machine learning.

Aurora is a “photonic” quantum computer, which means it crunches numbers using photonic qubits—information encoded in light. In practice, this means combining and recombining laser beams on multiple chips using lenses, fibers, and other optics according to an algorithm. Xanadu’s computer is designed in such a way that the answer to an algorithm it executes corresponds to the final number of photons in each laser beam. This approach differs from one used by Google and IBM, which involves encoding information in properties of superconducting circuits. 

Aurora has a modular design that consists of four similar units, each installed in a standard server rack that is slightly taller

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