The 55th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (DAMOP) from June 3-7, 2024, will feature presentations from Quantinuum’s physicists working on the world’s leading quantum computing hardware.

Our team members will cover various topics including quantum computation, scaling quantum technologies with ion-trap, and progress across various fields within atomic, molecular, and optical physics

Meet our quantum computing experts at Table 39, from June 4th – 6th to discuss what’s new and what’s next in trapped-ion quantum computing.

Join these sessions to discover how Quantinuum is advancing quantum computing:

‍Path to Scale QCCD Architecture for Trapped Ion Quantum Computers
‍Speaker: Patty Lee, Chief Scientist for Hardware Technology Development
Date and Time: June 3, 2:30 pm – 3:45 pm
Location: Room 202AB

Scalable Multispecies Ion Transport in a Grid-Based Surface-Electrode Trap
‍Speaker: Robert Delaney, Advanced Physicist
Date and Time: June 4, 10:45 am – 12:45 pm
Location: Room 203B

Benchmarking Quantinuum’s Second-Generation Quantum Processor
‍Speaker: Julia Cline, Advanced Physicist
Date and Time: June 4, 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Location: Room 203A

A fast and robust cooling method for trapped-ion qubits: phonon rapid adiabatic passage (Poster Session I)
Presenter: Ivaylo Madjarov, Numerical Physicist
Date and Time: June 4, 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Location: Hall BC

Laser Cooling Trapped-Ion Crystal Modes Beyond the Lamb-Dicke Regime
Speaker: Chris Gilbreth, Lead Physicist
Date and Time: June 7, 11:30 am – 11:42 am
Location: Room 201BC

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With the rapid evolution of Quantum Computing, users are contemplating the best way to begin to integrate Quantum capabilities into their existing HPC and AI infrastructure. Find our experts at the ISC conference, May 12^th-16^th, in Hamburg, Germany to discuss our world leading hardware, applications, and case studies. 

Exhibit Hall

Drop by Booth K50 in the exhibit hall to meet tour team and see a display of our System Model H2 chip, Powered by Honeywell. 

If you’d like to schedule a 1:1 meeting, send us an email to schedule a time to meet. We have reserved meeting room Hall 5 at ISC, but we’d be happy to set up time to meet with you at or after the event.

Presentations

Our team will be presenting on a range of topics about integrating quantum computing into existing HPC infrastructure. They’ll be speaking about our hardware features and how you can leverage quantum computing with your existing HPC cluster.

May 13^th

2:30pm – 3:00pm | Hall 4, ground level in the First-Time Exhibitor Pitch

Understanding Opportunities with Quantum Computing: Learn about our roadmap and key strategies to accelerate your current HPC clusters with the integration of quantum computing. 

Presented by Nash Palaniswamy, Chief Commercial Officer, Quantinuum

May 14^th

2:00pm – 2:30pm | GENCI Booth K40

Simulation of Transition Metal Oxide (TMO) Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD): A Study of the modelling of electronic energies used in the reactions involved for ALD of ZrO2 and of the reactivity of organometallic precursors used in ALD technology for controlling the quality of thin film deposition on different substrates. The study is a collaboration between C12 Quantum Electronics, Air Liquide and Quantinuum, with support from PAQ Ile de France.

Presented by Maud Einhorn, Technical Account Manager, and Gabriela Cimpan, Partner Manager, Quantinuum

May 14^th

2:20pm – 2:35pm | Hall Z – 3rd floor

The Trapped-Ion Quantum Processors at Quantinuum: Quantinuum has constructed two generations of QCCD (quantum charge-coupled device) quantum processors. These processors use trapped-ions for qubits and sympathetic cooling, and shuttling operations to achieve high-fidelity gating operations on individual qubits and between any pair of qubits – making them fully-connected. In this talk, Dave will discuss Quantinuum’s efforts to rigorously benchmark the performance of these machines, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. He’ll also give a brief survey of our efforts toward near-term quantum advantage and quantum error correction. Finally, he’ll sketch out some technological developments aimed at scaling these processors and the implications for future devices.

Presented by David Hayes, Sr. R&D Manager for Theory and Architecture

May 14^th and May 15^th

12:30pm – 1:00pm | Meeting Room Hall 5

3:30pm – 4:00pm | Meeting Room Hall 5

Quantum Computing, Error Correction, and Scaling for the Future at Quantinuum: Quantum computing promises to provide significant computational savings in valuable problems such as chemistry, materials, and cybersecurity. To make this a reality, errors in quantum operations must be suppressed significantly below where they are today, and the size of quantum computing hardware must be increased. Quantinuum has recently made significant strides in scaling to larger sizes. Join the session to hear about these exciting results, our plans to scale, and a look towards the future.

Presented by Chris Langer, Fellow and Chairman of the Technical Board, Quantinuum

May 16^th 

1:00pm – 1:20pm | Hall H, Booth L01 in the HPC Solutions Forum

‍Harnessing the potential of quantum computing: As the landscape of quantum computing continues to rapidly evolve, the question of when to invest in quantum computing knowledge remains a key strategic consideration for organizations. This talk will explore the challenge of quantum readiness by surveying some of the research collaborations Quantinuum has performed with a range of industry-leading organizations. Using real-world case studies, we will highlight the diverse array of sectors poised to benefit from early quantum adoption, including pharmaceuticals, finance, logistics, and cybersecurity. This talk begins to unpack why many first mover enterprise organizations have made significant investments in quantum readiness already, rather than deferring until the technology matures further. 

Presented by Maud Einhorn, Technical Account Manager, Quantinuum

May 16^th

4:30pm – 5:00pm | Hall Y1 - 2nd floor

Workshop on Benchmarking and Scaling the Quantum Charged Coupled Device Quantum Computing architecture in the Quantum and Hybrid Quantum-Classical Computing Approaches: The QCCD architecture provides a unique approach to quantum computing where qubits are mobile and operating zones are fixed. In contrast to QC architectures where qubit and couplings between them are fixed, the QCCD architecture naturally provides all-to-all connectivity and high-fidelity operations. Additional advanced features include mid-circuit measurement, qubit reset, conditional logic, and variable angle gates. The talk will present benchmarking of our machines and recent progress towards scaling to larger systems.

Presented by Chris Langer, Fellow and Chair of the Technical Board, Quantinuum

We are surrounded by optimization problems – for example, what’s the most efficient route for getting all your chores done on a Sunday? What’s the best way to pack a suitcase? Modern businesses can’t escape the importance of optimization problems, they’re critical in everything from charting shipping routes to setting prices. 

To solve such real-world examples, experts build mathematical models and explore computer algorithms capable of finding the optimal path through a problem. In many cases, as they scale, problems become intractable to even the most powerful classical supercomputers. Research suggests that for some problems, quantum algorithms offer some new promise. Our researchers have explored a quantum approach to a widely applicable optimization problem called “Max-Cut”, where one cuts a graph to snip as many vertices as possible.

Finding exact solutions to the Max-Cut problem in a reasonable amount of time would have practical applications in a wide range of situations, including supply chain management, machine scheduling, image recognition, quality control, fraud detection, patient diagnostics, and electric circuit design. For a generic graph, this problem is really hard: a computer scientist would call it “NP hard”. There is no known classical algorithm to solve Max-Cut for a generic graph whose runtime is polynomial in the number of vertices L, and it is strongly believed that no such classical algorithm exists. Many other useful optimization problems have a similar problem: they may simply be too expensive to solve exactly with classical computers. Back in the real world, this explains why many aspects of daily life run sub-optimally. Consider the experience of multiple drivers delivering a succession of small goods from the same vendor, often packaged in clearly oversized boxes. The costs of this sort of inefficiency accrue in terms of time, money, and environmental impact, locally and at the full scale of the global economy.

Our team has been working on applying a quantum solution to the Max-Cut problem based on the adiabatic theorem of quantum mechanics. Using the adiabatic theorem to solve an optimization problem involves encoding the problem into the qubits (setting up the Hamiltonian), then letting the system slowly evolve some parameter, carefully keeping it in the ground state the whole time. This method is an all-purpose solver for classically hard optimization problems, but it comes at a large computational cost: the “slow” evolution means applying lots of expensive gates to perform the many time steps needed. 

Our team figured out that instead of taking many expensive steps they could instead take a limited amount without destroying the convergence, as long as the optimization problem has a classical Hamiltonian. They call this “Floquet adiabatic evolution” and find that this approach reduces the required number of gates by several orders of magnitude.

Contrary to variational quantum algorithms such as Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), these low circuit depths can be achieved without classical optimization of parameters (whose sensitivity to noise and scaling behavior is not well understood).

Extrapolating their numerical simulation results, the team estimated that there may be a quantum speedup for this problem with a 2-qubit gate infidelity around 10^-5 and roughly 2000 qubits. Our H1 system already boasts a world-class 2-qubit gate infidelity of 8.8 × 10^-4, and we are well on our way towards even better fidelity with more qubits. You can see our roadmap here, and read the paper here.

In the meantime, the paper proposes that this method could be used as a quantum computing benchmark for application-oriented problems, making a valuable contribution to the Bench-QC project, of which Quantinuum is a founding member.

By Ilyas Khan, Founder and Chief Product Officer, Jenni Strabley, Sr Director of Offering Management

All quantum error correction schemes depend for their success on physical hardware achieving high enough fidelity. If there are too many errors in the physical qubit operations, the error correcting code has the effect of amplifying rather than diminishing overall error rates. For decades now, it has been hoped that one day a quantum computer would achieve “three 9's” – an iconic, inherent 99.9% 2-qubit physical gate fidelity – at which point many of the error-correcting codes required for universal fault tolerant quantum computing would successfully be able to squeeze errors out of the system.

That day has now arrived. Building on several previous laboratory demonstrations ^{1 2 3}, Quantinuum has become the first company ever to achieve “three 9's” in a commercially-available quantum computer, with the first demonstration of 99.914(3)% 2-qubit gate fidelity, showing repeatable performance across all qubit pairs on our H1-1 system that is constantly available to customers. This production-environment announcement is a marked difference to one-offs recorded in carefully contrived laboratory conditions. This demonstrates what will fast become the expected standard for the entire quantum computing sector.

Quantinuum is also announcing another milestone, a seven-figure Quantum Volume (QV) of 1,048,576 – or in terms preferred by the experts, 2²⁰ – reinforcing our commitment to building, by a significant margin, the highest-performing quantum computers in the world.

These announcements follow a historic month that started when we proved our ability to scale our systems to the sizes needed to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems – and in a way that offers the best path to universal quantum computing.  

On March 5^th, 2024, Quantinuum researchers disclosed details of our experiments that provide a solution to a totemic problem faced by all quantum computing architectures, known as the wiring problem. Supported by a video showing qubits being shuffled through a 2-dimensional grid ion-trap, our team presented concrete proof of the scalability of the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) architecture used in our H-Series quantum computers. 

Stop-motion ion transport video showing a chosen sorting operation implemented on an 8-site 2D grid trap with the swap-or-stay primitive. The sort is implemented by discrete choices of swaps or stays between neighboring sites. The numbers shown (indicated by dashed circles) at the beginning and end of the video show the initial and final location of the ions after the sort, e.g. the ion that starts at the top left site ends at the bottom right site. The stop-motion video was collected by segmenting the primitive operation and pausing mid-operation such that Yb fluorescence could be detected with a CMOS camera exposure.

On April 3^rd, 2024 in partnership with Microsoft, our teams announced a breakthrough in quantum error correction that delivered as its crowning achievement the most reliable logical qubits on record.

We revealed detailed demonstrations in an arXiv pre-print paper of the reliability achieved via 4 logical qubits encoded into just 30 physical qubits on our System Model H2 quantum computer. Our joint teams were able to demonstrate logical circuit error rates far below physical circuit error rates, a capability that our full-stack quantum computer is currently the only one in the world with the fidelity required to achieve. 

Explaining the importance of 2-qubit gate fidelity

Reaching this level of physical fidelity is not optional for commercial scale computers – it is essential for error correction to work, and that in turn is a necessary foundation for any useful quantum computer. Our record two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.914(3)% marks a symbolic inflection point for the industry: at ”three 9's” fidelity, we are nearing or surpassing the break-even point (where logical qubits outperform physical qubits) for many quantum error correction protocols, and this will generate great interest among research and industrial teams exploring fault-tolerant methods for tackling real-world problems.

Without hardware fidelity this good, error-corrected calculations are noisier than un-corrected computations. This is why we call it a “threshold” – when gate errors are “above threshold”, quantum computers will remain noisy no matter what you do. Below threshold, you can use quantum error correction to push error rates way, way down, so that quantum computers eventually become as reliable as classical computers.  

Four years ago, Quantinuum claimed that it would improve the performance of its H-Series quantum computers by 10x each year for five years, when measured by the industry’s most widely recognized benchmark, QV (an industry standard not to be confused with less comprehensive metrics such as Algorithmic Qubits). 

Today’s achievement of a 2²⁰ QV – which as with all our demonstrations was achieved on our commercially-available machine – shows that our team is living up to this audacious commitment. We are completely confident we can continue to overcome the technical problems that stand in the way of even better fidelity and QV performance. Our QV data is available on GitHub, as are our hardware specifications

The combination of high QV and gate fidelities puts the Quantinuum system in a class by-itself – it is far and away the best of any commercially-available quantum computer.

‍QCCD: the path to fault tolerance

Additionally, and notably, these benchmarks were achieved “inherently”, without error mitigation, thanks to the H Series’ all-to-all connectivity and QCCD architecture. Full connectivity results in less errors when running large, complicated circuits. While other modalities depend on error mitigation techniques, such techniques are not scalable and present only a modest near-term value. 

Lower physical error and high connectivity means our quantum computers have a provably lower overhead for error-corrected computation.

Looking more deeply, experts look for high fidelities that are valid in all operating zones and between any pair of qubits. In contrast to our competitors, this is precisely what our H Series delivers. We do not suffer from a broad distribution of gate fidelities between different pairs of qubits, meaning that some pairs of qubits have significantly lower fidelities. Quantinuum is the only quantum computing company with all qubit pairs boasting above 99.9% fidelity.

Alongside these benefits and demonstrations of scalability, fidelity, connectivity, and reliability, it is worth noting how these features impact what arguably matters the most to users – time to solution. In the QCCD architecture, speed of operations is decoupled from speed to reach a computational solution thanks to a combination of:

• a better signal to noise ratio than other modalities
• drastically reducing or eliminating the number of swap gates required (because we can move our ions through space), and
• reducing the number of trials required for an accurate result.

The net effect is that for increasingly complex circuits it takes a high-fidelity QCCD-type quantum computer less time to achieve accurate results than other 2D connected or lower-fidelity architectures.

“Getting to three 9’s in the QCCD architecture means that ~1000 entangling operations can be done before an error occurs. Our quantum computers are right at the edge of being able to do computations at the physical level that are beyond the reach of classical computers, which would occur somewhere between 3 nines and 4 nines. Some tasks become hard for classical computers before this regime (e.g. Google’s random circuit sampling problem) but this new regime allows for much less contrived problems to be solved. At that point, these machines become real tools for new discoveries – albeit they will still be limited in what they can probe, likely to be physics simulations or closely related problems,” said Dave Hayes, a Senior R&D manager at Quantinuum.

“Additionally, these fidelities put us, some would say comfortably, within the regime needed to build fault-tolerant machines. These fidelities allow us to start adding more qubits without needing to improve performance further, and to take advantage of quantum error correction to improve the computational power necessary for tackling truly large problems. This scaling problem gets easier with even better fidelities (which is why we’re not satisfied with 3 nines) but it is possible in principle.”

Quantinuum’s new records in fidelity and quantum volume on our commercial H1 device are expected to be achieved on the H2, once upgrades are implemented, underscoring the value that we offer to users for whom stability, reliability and robust performance are pre-requisites. The quantum computing landscape is complex and changing, but we remain at the head of the pack in all key metrics. The relationship with our world-class applications teams means that co-designed devices for solving some of the world’s most intractable problems are a big step closer to reality.

Quantinuum is the world’s leading quantum computing company, and our world-class scientists and engineers are continually driving our technology forward while expanding the possibilities for our users. Their work on applications includes cybersecurity, quantum chemistry, quantum Monte Carlo integration, quantum topological data analysis, condensed matter physics, high energy physics, quantum machine learning, and natural language processing – and we are privileged to support them to bring new solutions to bear on some of the greatest challenges we face.

Today, we celebrate the role that quantum science and technology plays in our everyday lives. At Quantinuum, we are on a mission to use quantum technologies to positively impact the world. With our H-Series quantum computers and world-leading software solutions, we will continue to work with the global community of researchers, engineers, and scientists to push boundaries and solve industry’s most complex computational problems.

Interested in learning more about Quantinuum and our quantum computing technologies? Meet our team of quantum experts at these events: 

• From April 13^th - 15^th, our team of evangelists, business leaders and scientists will be participating in YQuantum, Yale’s inaugural quantum computing hackathon, and hosting an associated workshop for students and professors. Participants will have the opportunity to design new quantum algorithms and use quantum algorithms to solve unique problems.

• On April 15^th, Prof. Bob Coecke will be in Washington, DC to discuss quantum inclusivity through “Quantum in Pictures”, a groundbreaking curriculum created to democratize quantum skills. Join Prof. Coecke at Elevate Quantum’s “Diversity Fueled Quantum Innovation and How the Mountain West is Assuring U.S. Leadership in the Most Important Technology of the 21st Century” event, established to brief Members of Congress, staffers and agency leaders on the state of quantum, workforce development and the need to build an inclusive quantum community.

• On April 17^th, Anand Shah will deliver a talk on “Trapped Ion Quantum Computing, current advancement and future plans” at the C4IR KSA event in Saudi Arabia. Anand will share insights on the quantum computing ecosystem, Quantinuum’s full-stack quantum computing technology and our work with partners and collaborators to develop industry-relevant applications.

Hear from our experts on the value of provable quantum randomness for cybersecurity, in partnership with Thales

The world is preparing for the biggest cryptographic migration in history. Organizations must update their tools and policies to provide robust crypto discovery, post-quantum algorithms, and sources of provable quantum randomness. Starting early is critical to ensure migration is complete before the quantum threat materializes.

Join Thales, IBM and Quantinuum as we delve into practical guidance for a post-quantum transformation on May 8, at 10:30am in the North Hall Briefing Center at Quantum Leap: Insights and Approaches for a Post-Quantum World. Speakers include Todd Moore, Global Head of Data Security Products at Thales, Antti Ropponen, Executive Partner and Global Data & Application Security Services Leader, and Duncan Jones, Head of Cybersecurity at Quantinuum.

In addition to speaking alongside Thales and IBM at the RSA Conference, Quantinuum is sponsoring Thales’ PQC Palooza on May 8 from 4:00 – 7:00pm at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. This is an exclusive post-quantum cryptography (PQC) event with industry experts sharing their approaches to preparing for the post-quantum era. The keynote address will be delivered by industry luminary Dr. Taher Elgamal, one of the forefathers of SSL, who will provide his unique perspective on cryptography and the upcoming PQC transformation. Additionally, there will be a panel discussion and an opportunity to talk with the Quantinuum team.

Visit our team at Booth 5280

5280 is the elevation (in feet) of Denver, where our commercial quantum computer sits. It’s also the number of our booth at the RSA Conference, where you can speak with our cyber experts. Look for our booth #5280 in the North Hall.

We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!