Integrating Quantum Co Processors with High Performance Computers
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The collaboration between the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center (SQMS) and Rigetti Computing produced several advancements in our understanding of the role of materials characteristics in quantum processor performance. This partnership leverages SQMS's extensive characterization infrastructure and cutting-edge research in materials, and Rigetti's expertise in quantum hardware and robust nanofabrication to improve precision and performance of Rigetti's test QPUs. Qubit frequency is determined in large part by the properties of Josephson junctions (JJs) made of amorphous oxide tunnel barriers; the Alternating-Bias Assisted Annealing (ABAA) process allows us to tune JJs to their desired frequency [1]. Work by SQMS researchers in characterizing high-precision JJs post-processed (using ABAA) have yielded crucial information on the nature of the structure and chemical bonding uniformity of the ABAA processed amorphous oxides. Performance has also been improved through a comprehensive series of experiments that tested encapsulation and surface treatment. Encapsulation of the niobium metal layer with tantalum resulted in an T1 improvement of 80%, experimentally confirming the role of Nb surface losses in qubit performance [2]. Pre-treatment of the underlying silicon surface prior to JJ fabrication by replacing a buffered oxide etch (BOE) with hydrofluoric acid (HF) followed by aqueous ammonium fluoride (NH4F) has shown a statistically significant improvement of T1 by 22%, and reduction in the number of strongly-coupled TLS [3]. These examples, as well as many other published and ongoing investigations, demonstrate the mutual benefits that come from Rigetti's involvement in the SQMS collaboration. [1] - Pappas, D.P., et al. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43246-024-00596-z [2] - Bal, M., et al. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41534-024-00840-x [3] Kopas, C. J. et al. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.02863 (2024).
Quantum computing offers the potential to revolutionize high-performance computing by providing a means to solve certain computational problems asymptotically faster than any classical computer. Quantum computing has advanced recently from merely a theoretical possibility to engineered reality, including commercial entities offering early prototype quantum processors, both special-purpose quantum annealers and general-purpose gate-model processors. The media have been showcasing each new development and implicitly conveying the message that quantum-computing ubiquity is nigh. Here, we will respond to this hype and provide an overview of the exciting but still early state of the field. In this tutorial, we introduce participants to the computational models that give quantum computing its immense computational power. We examine the thought processes that programmers need to map problems to quantum computers. And we discuss hardware and algorithmic challenges that must be overcome before quantum computing becomes a component of every software developer's repertoire.
Quantum computing offers the potential to revolutionize high-performance computing by providing a means to solve certain computational problems asymptotically faster than any classical computer. Quantum computing has advanced recently from merely a theoretical possibility to engineered reality, including commercial entities offering early prototype quantum processors, both special-purpose quantum annealers and general-purpose gate-model processors. The media have been showcasing each new development and implicitly conveying the message that quantum-computing ubiquity is nigh. Here, we will respond to this hype and provide an overview of the exciting but still early state of the field. In this tutorial, we introduce participants to the computational models that give quantum computing its immense computational power. We examine the thought processes that programmers need to map problems to quantum computers. And we discuss hardware and algorithmic challenges that must be overcome before quantum computing becomes a component of every software developer's repertoire. (Update of 2022 slides)
We review the prospects to build quantum processors based on superconducting transmons and radiofrequency cavities for testing applications in the NISQ era. We identify engineering opportunities and challenges for implementation of algorithms in simulation, combinatorial optimization, and quantum machine learning in qudit-based quantum computers.
Abstract Frequency conversion between microwave and optical photons is a key enabling technology to create links between superconducting quantum processors and to realize distributed quantum networks. We propose a microwave-optical transduction platform based on long-coherence time superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) cavities coupled to electro-optic optical cavities to mitigate the loss mechanisms that limit the attainment of high conversion efficiency. We optimize the microwave-optical field overlap and optical coupling losses in the design while achieving long microwave and optical photon lifetime at milli-Kelvin temperatures. This represents a significant enhancement of the transduction efficiency up to 50% under incoming pump power of 140 μW, which allows the conversion of few-photon quantum signals. Furthermore, this scheme exhibits high resolution for optically reading out the dispersive shift induced by a superconducting transmon qubit coupled to the SRF cavity. We also show that low microwave losses enhance the fidelity of heralded entanglement generation between two remote quantum systems. Finally, high precision in quantum sensing can be reached below the standard quantum limit.
Quantum transduction refers to the coherent conversion between microwave and optical states, which can be achieved by quantum teleportation if given high-fidelity microwave-optical entanglement, namely entanglement-based quantum transduction. Reliable microwave-optical entanglement can be generated using various platforms. Here, in this paper we base the discussion on a piezo-optomechanical system and make the teleportation induced conversion scheme more concrete in the framework of quantum channel theory. By comparing the quantum capacity between the entanglement-based conversion channel and the traditional direct quantum transduction channel, we show that the entanglement-based scheme indeed admits a positive transduction rate when the direct quantum transduction has zero quantum capacity. Given two piezo-optomechanical systems, we also investigate the generation of microwave-microwave entanglement from entanglement swapping within continuous-variable and discrete-variable settings, showing the potentials of directly connecting microwave quantum processors by microwave-microwave quantum teleportation.
Simulating the properties of many-body fermionic systems is an outstanding computational challenge relevant to material science, quantum chemistry, and particle physics.-5.4pc]Please note that the spelling of the following author names in the manuscript differs from the spelling provided in the article metadata: D. González-Cuadra, D. Bluvstein, M. Kalinowski, R. Kaubruegger, N. Maskara, P. Naldesi, T. V. Zache, A. M. Kaufman, M. D. Lukin, H. Pichler, B. Vermersch, Jun Ye, and P. Zoller. The spelling provided in the manuscript has been retained; please confirm. Although qubit-based quantum computers can potentially tackle this problem more efficiently than classical devices, encoding nonlocal fermionic statistics introduces an overhead in the required resources, limiting their applicability on near-term architectures. In this work, we present a fermionic quantum processor, where fermionic models are locally encoded in a fermionic register and simulated in a hardware-efficient manner using fermionic gates. We consider in particular fermionic atoms in programmable tweezer arrays and develop different protocols to implement nonlocal gates, guaranteeing Fermi statistics at the hardware level. We use this gate set, together with Rydberg-mediated interaction gates, to find efficient circuit decompositions for digital and variational quantum simulation algorithms, illustrated here for molecular energy estimation. Finally, we consider a combined fermion-qubit architecture, where both the motional and internal degrees of freedom of the atoms are harnessed to efficiently implement quantum phase estimation as well as to simulate lattice gauge theory dynamics.
Scalable quantum processors require high-fidelity universal quantum logic operations in a manufacturable physical platform. Donors in silicon provide atomic size, excellent quantum coherence and compatibility with standard semiconductor processing, but no entanglement between donor-bound electron spins has been demonstrated to date. Here we present the experimental demonstration and tomography of universal one- and two-qubit gates in a system of two weakly exchange-coupled electrons, bound to single phosphorus donors introduced in silicon by ion implantation. We observe that the exchange interaction has no effect on the qubit coherence. We quantify the fidelity of the quantum operations using gate set tomography (GST), and we use the universal gate set to create entangled Bell states of the electrons spins, with fidelity 91.3 ± 3.0%, and concurrence 0.87 ± 0.05. These results form the necessary basis for scaling up donor-based quantum computers.
A quantum internet connects remote quantum processors that need to interact and exchange quantum signals over a long distance through photonic channels. However, these quantum nodes operate at the wavelength ranges unsuitable for long-distance transmission. Therefore, quantum wavelength conversion to telecom bands is crucial for long-distance quantum networks based on optical fiber. Here, we propose wavelength conversion devices for single-photon polarization qubits using continuous-variable quantum teleportation that can efficiently convert qubits between near-infrared (780–795 nm suitable for interacting with atomic quantum nodes) and telecom wavelength (1300–1500 nm suitable for long-distance transmission). The teleportation uses entangled photon fields (i.e., nondegenerate two-mode squeezed state) that can be generated by four-wave mixing in a rubidium atomic gas using a diamond configuration of atomic transitions. The entangled fields can be emitted in two orthogonal polarizations with locked relative phase, making them especially suitable for interfacing with single- photon polarization qubits. Furthermore, our work may pave the way for the realization of long-distance quantum networks.
Mechanisms for suppressing thermalization in disorder-free many-body systems, such as Hilbert space fragmentation and quantum many-body scars, have recently attracted much interest in foundations of quantum statistical physics and potential quantum information processing applications. However, their sensitivity to realistic effects such as finite temperature remains largely unexplored. Here, we have utilized IBM's Kolkata quantum processor to demonstrate an unexpected robustness of quantum many-body scars at finite temperatures when the system is prepared in a thermal Gibbs ensemble. We identify such robustness in the PXP model, which describes quantum many-body scars in experimental systems of Rydberg atom arrays and ultracold atoms in tilted Bose-Hubbard optical lattices. By contrast, other theoretical models which host exact quantum many-body scars are found to lack such robustness and their scarring properties quickly decay with temperature. Our study sheds light on the important differences between scarred models in terms of their algebraic structures, which impacts their resilience to finite temperature. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Abstract A composable design scheme is presented for the development of hybrid quantum/classical algorithms and workflows for applications of quantum simulation. The proposed object‐oriented approach is based on constructing an expressive set of common data structures and methods that enables programming of a broad variety of complex hybrid quantum simulation applications. The abstract core of the scheme is distilled from the analysis of the current quantum simulation algorithms. Subsequently, it allows synthesis of new hybrid algorithms and workflows via the extension, specialisation, and dynamic customisation of the abstract core classes defined by the proposed design. The design scheme is implemented using the hardware‐agnostic programming language QCOR into the QuaSiMo library. To validate the implementation, the authors test and show its utility on commercial quantum processors from IBM and Rigetti, running some prototypical quantum simulations.
High-fidelity deterministic quantum state transfer and multi-qubit entanglement are demonstrated in a quantum network comprising two superconducting quantum nodes one metre apart, with each node including three interconnected qubits. The generation of high-fidelity distributed multi-qubit entanglement is a challenging task for large-scale quantum communication and computational networks. The deterministic entanglement of two remote qubits has recently been demonstrated with both photons and phonons. However, the deterministic generation and transmission of multi-qubit entanglement has not been demonstrated, primarily owing to limited state-transfer fidelities. Here we report a quantum network comprising two superconducting quantum nodes connected by a one-metre-long superconducting coaxial cable, where each node includes three interconnected qubits. By directly connecting the cable to one qubit in each node, we transfer quantum states between the nodes with a process fidelity of 0.911 +/- 0.008. We also prepare a three-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state in one node and deterministically transfer this state to the other node, with a transferred-state fidelity of 0.656 +/- 0.014. We further use this system to deterministically generate a globally distributed two-node, six-qubit GHZ state with a state fidelity of 0.722 +/- 0.021. In this work, the GHZ state fidelities are clearly above the threshold of 1/2 for genuine multipartite entanglement, showing that this architecture can be used to coherently link together multiple superconducting quantum processors, providing a modular approach for building large-scale quantum computers.
Quantum computing has emerged as a transformative technology capable of solving complex problems beyond the limit of classical systems. The rapid development of quantum processors has led to the proliferation of cloud-based quantum computing services offered by platforms such as IBM, Google, and Amazon. These platforms introduce unique challenges in resource allocation, job scheduling, and multi-device orchestration as quantum workloads become increasingly complex. In this work, we present a digital twin of quantum cloud infrastructures: a framework designed to model and simulate the behavior of real quantum cloud systems. Developed in Python using the SimPy discrete-event simulation library, the framework replicates key aspects of quantum cloud environments, including detailed quantum device modeling, job lifecycle management, and job fidelity. It incorporates noise-aware fidelity estimation, making it the first of its kind to simulate superconducting gate-based quantum cloud systems at an administrative level with job fidelity. We present use cases as proof of concept, demonstrating that our quantum cloud simulation framework can act as a digital twin of a quantum cloud and support the modeling and implementation of practical systems.
Work performed under this one-year LDRD was concerned with estimating resource requirements for small quantum test beds that are expected to be available in the near future. This work represents a preliminary demonstration of our ability to leverage quantum hardware for solving small quantum simulation problems in areas of interest to the DOE. The algorithms enabling such studies are hybrid quantum-classical variational algorithms, in particular the widely-used variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). Employing this hybrid algorithm, in which the quantum computer complements the classical one, we implemented an end-to-end application-level toolchain that allows the user to specify a molecule of interest and compute the ground state energy using the VQE approach. We found significant limitations attributable to the classical portion of the hybrid system, including a greater than greater-than-quartic power scaling of the classical memory requirements with the system size. Current VQE approaches would require an exascale machine for solving any molecule with size greater than 150 nuclei. Our findings include several improvements that we implemented into the VQE toolchain, including a new classical optimizer that is decades old but hadn't been considered before in the VQE ecosystem. Our findings suggest limitations to variational hybrid approaches to simulation that further motivate the need for a gate-based fault-tolerant quantum processor that can implement larger problems using the fully digital quantum phase estimation algorithm.
This study explores the feasibility of leveraging quantum machine learning (QML) to analyze NASA Earth Observational (EO) data for climate change research, with a particular focus on the phenomenon of ”crop frosting” which has become more prevalent due to climate change. We implemented and evaluated two QML models, the Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) and Quantum Support Vector Classifier (QSVC), in both simulated and real quantum computing environments using a 127 qubit IBM quantum processor. Our study emphasizes the scientific rigor in comparing these quantum models with a classical Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, highlighting their performance in processing climate data. The results offer valuable insights into the potential scientific advantages, limitations, and scalability of QML for analyzing EO datasets, thus paving the way for more advanced climate modeling and predictive analytics using quantum computing. We showcased how Environmental Interaction Knowledge Graphs (EIKGs) and Digital Twins (DTs) can be integrated into this study. This research underscores the transformative potential of Classical and QML leveraging KGs and DT to address the multifaceted challenges posed by climate change.
We present a collection of optimizers tuned for usage on Noisy Inter-mediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Optimizers have a range of applications in quantum computing, including the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) and Quantum Approximate Optimization (QAOA) algorithms. They have further uses in calibration, hyperparameter tuning, machine learning, etc. We employ the VQE algorithm as a case study. VQE is a hybrid algorithm, with a classical minimizer step driving the next evaluation on the quantum processor. While most results to date concentrated on tuning the quantum VQE circuit, our study indicates that in the presence of quantum noise the classical minimizer step is a weak link and a careful choice combined with tuning is required for correct results. We explore state-of-the-art gradient-free optimizers capable of handling noisy, black-box, cost functions and stress-test them using a quantum circuit simulation environment with noise injection capabilities on individual gates. Our results indicate that specifically tuned optimizers are crucial to obtaining valid science results on NISQ hardware, as well as projecting forward on fault tolerant circuits.
Ternary quantum processors offer significant potential computational advantages over conventional qubit technologies, leveraging the encoding and processing of quantum information in qutrits (three-level systems). Therefore, to evaluate and compare the performance of such emerging quantum hardware it is essential to have robust benchmarking methods suitable for a higher-dimensional Hilbert space. We demonstrate extensions of industry standard randomized benchmarking (RB) protocols, developed and used extensively for qubits, suitable for ternary quantum logic. Using a superconducting five-qutrit processor, we find an average single-qutrit process infidelity of 3.8×10 -3 . Through interleaved RB, we characterize a few relevant gates, and employ simultaneous RB to fully characterize crosstalk errors. Finally, we apply cycle benchmarking to a two-qutrit CSUM gate and obtain a two-qutrit process fidelity of 0.85. Our results present and demonstrate RB-based tools to characterize the performance of a qutrit processor, and a general approach to diagnose control errors in future qudit hardware.