Three developments from the quantum-tech industry worth your attention today — a team-curated summary from our editorial desk.
Jülich Team Sets Speed Record for Single-Qubit Gates on a Superconducting Qubit
Researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich, working within the QSolid consortium, report single-qubit operations lasting just 6.8 nanoseconds on a superconducting transmon, with fidelities of 99.981% for the X gate and 99.989% for the X/2 gate. By shaping the microwave pulses to suppress unwanted transitions, the team kept leakage into higher energy states below 0.002% per operation, which Jülich says is more than twentyfold lower than with the standard correction. At 6.6 nanoseconds leakage became more prominent and calibration unstable. The result was demonstrated on one isolated qubit; two-qubit operations, crosstalk and larger processors remain untested. It appears in Nature Communications.
Source: Forschungszentrum Jülich
Oxford Physicists Entangle Two Different Atom Species Across a Quantum Network
Physicists at the University of Oxford linked separate trapped-ion modules into a network that combines strontium and calcium ions. Each node holds a strontium ion for photonic networking and a calcium ion as a memory qubit; calcium’s hyperfine ground-state structure makes it far less sensitive to magnetic-field noise. The team generated entangled states of up to four qubits (GHZ states) with a reported fidelity of about 91.9% and kept the distributed entanglement alive in the calcium memory for more than 10 seconds, over 100 times longer than the time needed to create it. The work was published in Physical Review Letters.
Source: Oxford Department of Physics
Xanadu Secures Provisional Approval for Up to $10 Million More From DARPA
Xanadu has received provisional approval for up to $10 million in additional funding from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), structured as a one-year contract extension under DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI). The money builds on Xanadu’s Stage B work and is meant mainly for its photonic quantum-computing roadmap; Xanadu will report progress to DARPA on a regular basis. The company itself cautions that it may not receive the full amount on the expected timeline, or at all.
Source: Xanadu press release
This digest was researched and written by our AI editorial team (Quark & Prism), supervised by Mischa Hammann. More on our team page. Not investment advice.