For more than a decade, a team of researchers, engineers and developers at Microsoft has been working on quantum computing, a new model of computing that promises exponential increases in processing power and could help scientists tackle questions previously considered unanswerable—on topics ranging from climate science and medical research, to the human genome and economics.
We show how a quantum computer can be employed to elucidate reaction mechanisms in complex chemical systems, using the open problem of biological nitrogen fixation in nitrogenase as an example. We discuss how quantum computers can augment classical-computer simulations for such problems, to significantly increase their accuracy and enable hitherto intractable simulations.
We are pleased to announce that the American Physical Society (APS) journal, Physical Review Letters, has selected the Station Q paper, Transport Signatures of Quasiparticle Poisoning in a Majorana Island, as an Editors’ Suggestion.
In our quest for topological quantum computing with Majorana zero modes, one missing piece is the efficient, high-quality creation of magic states to perform the π/8 (or “T” gate).
A major hurdle for quantum algorithms for linear systems of equations, and for quantum simulation algorithms, is the difficulty to find simple circuits for arithmetic. Prior approaches typically led to a large overhead in terms of quantum memory, required operations, or implementation error.
QCoDeS is an open source data acquisition framework that was created by distilling the homegrown solutions used in Station Q’s experimental labs, and infused with all the best practices from the open source software world.
As its name implies, the poisoning of Majorana devices by normal electrons is fatal to topological computation, so much effort is now focused on characterizing the degree of poisoning either by the creation of quasiparticle pairs within the device, or by electrons entering the device through the leads. A recent experiment (see https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.
Last year saw a materials breakthrough, with the realization of a two-dimensional heterostructure combining superconductor and semiconductor layers. (See journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.93.15540.) Now, as shown in a recent report, this material has been used to study interference effects controlled by magnetic fields in a Josephson junction made from this material.
Generation of reversible circuits from high-level code is an important problem in the compilation flow of quantum algorithms to lower-level hardware. The instantiation of quantum oracles in particular will require mapping classical circuits to a reversible implementation.
In this paper, published in Physical Review A, we show how to greatly improve success at solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems on a quantum computer by using a learned schedule, instead of the standard linear ramps.
The 2016 QRetreat took place on Microsoft’s Redmond campus on April 28 and 29, 2016. QRetreat is an annual meeting of the Station Q Santa Barbara and Station Q Redmond teams. The goals of the meeting are to update each other on the recent research in an informal atmosphere and discuss current projects.
LIQUi|> is a software architecture and tool suite for quantum computing. It includes a programming language, optimization and scheduling algorithms, and quantum simulators. LIQUi|> can be used to translate a quantum algorithm written in the form of a high-level program into the low-level machine instructions for a quantum device.
