Quantinuum announces its new laboratory space in Broomfield
Focusing on optics and electromechanical engineering
Quantinuum has unveiled our new optics and electromechanical engineering laboratory space at our largest operating site, in Broomfield Colorado.
Not only is the new space more than twice as big as the space we occupy today, but it will also house a clean, quiet, temperature controlled, state-of-the-art laboratory that befits the excellence of the work we do here.
Our hardware engineering and teams are focused on optimizing, customizing, and miniaturizing the components that power the H-Series quantum computers, demanding that our teams blur the boundaries between discrete disciplines, such as bulk optics and micro photonics, or embedded software and control electronics. Getting the handover right between different deeply skilled experts requires proximity and an intimate understanding of how one workflow blends into the other.
This is why this new lab space will make such a powerful contribution to our hardware success: because it is built around the needs of deeply connected, multidisciplinary teams, entirely focused on our goal of designing and building the first truly useful, breakaway quantum computer.
Six things you need to know about Quantinuum’s new lab
- State-of-the-Art Facility: Our new lab, with its state-of-the-art design and facilities, creates an environment for collaboration that will spur advances in the fields of optics, photonics, electromechanical engineering, and others.
- Expansive and Efficient Space: The lab is not only going to be much larger than what we have today, it is also highly functional, with high ceilings and cloud superstructures over optics benches for better movement and workflow, which will afford our teams greater flexibility and access to every angle of the technology they are creating.
- Advancing Micro and Nano Optics: As we aim to reduce our beam delivery size, we're drawing together the work of different teams, creating a dynamic environment where optics transitions into photonics, yielding new potential in terms of size, scale and performance. The location of certain teams will enable such cross-disciplinary workflows.
- Custom Fabrication Capabilities: The new optics lab, together with our highly capable chip and trap fabrication capabilities, is designed to enable generational transitions from off-the-shelf, multipurpose optical components to fabricating more compact and fit-for-purpose devices: Think of moving from Functionality on a Table, through Functionality on a Chip, to Functionality on a Trap.
- Greater Collaboration and Integration: The new laboratory layout improves the way some teams are co-located, with an eye always toward helping to enhance collaboration. For example, the new engineering space was designed to facilitate close cooperation between the electronics and software teams who design our control systems, as well as the mechanical teams who package the hardware and the test teams who validate it. Such proximity between disciplines supports faster decision-making and more efficient resolution of interdisciplinary challenges, leading to a virtuous circle of accelerated design and development, faster innovation, and better quantum computers.
- Ready for Future Expansion: As we prepare for the next stage of the journey towards fault-tolerant quantum computing, where demand for quantum compute will scale exponentially everywhere, this new laboratory space is fit for the future as well as meeting the demands of today.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum company, pioneers powerful quantum computers and advanced software solutions. Quantinuum’s technology drives breakthroughs in materials discovery, cybersecurity, and next-gen quantum AI. With over 500 employees, including 370+ scientists and engineers, Quantinuum leads the quantum computing revolution across continents.
For a novel technology to be successful, it must prove that it is both useful and works as described.
Checking that our computers “work as described” is called benchmarking and verification by the experts. We are proud to be leaders in this field, with the most benchmarked quantum processors in the world. We also work with National Laboratories in various countries to develop new benchmarking techniques and standards. Additionally, we have our own team of experts leading the field in benchmarking and verification.
Currently, a lot of verification (i.e. checking that you got the right answer) is done by classical computers – most quantum processors can still be simulated by a classical computer. As we move towards quantum processors that are hard (or impossible) to simulate, this introduces a problem: how can we keep checking that our technology is working correctly without simulating it?
We recently partnered with the UK’s Quantum Software Lab to develop a novel and scalable verification and benchmarking protocol that will help us as we make the transition to quantum processors that cannot be simulated.
This new protocol does not require classical simulation, or the transfer of a qubit between two parties. The team’s “on-chip” verification protocol eliminates the need for a physically separated verifier and makes no assumptions about the processor’s noise. To top it all off, this new protocol is qubit-efficient.
The team’s protocol is application-agnostic, benefiting all users. Further, the protocol is optimized to our QCCD hardware, meaning that we have a path towards verified quantum advantage – as we compute more things that cannot be classically simulated, we will be able to check that what we are doing is right.
Running the protocol on Quantinuum System Model H1, the team ended up performing the largest verified Measurement Based Quantum Computing (MBQC) circuit to date. This was enabled by our System Model H1’s low cross-talk gate zones, mid-circuit measurement and reset, and long coherence times. By performing the largest verified MBQC computation to date, and by verifying computations significantly larger than any others to be verified before, we reaffirm the Quantinuum Systems as best-in-class.
Particle accelerators like the LHC take serious computing power. Often on the bleeding-edge of computing technology, accelerator projects sometimes even drive innovations in computing. In fact, while there is some controversy over exactly where the world wide web was created, it is often attributed to Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, who developed it to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
With annual data generated by accelerators in excess of exabytes (a billion gigabytes), tens of millions of lines of code written to support the experiments, and incredibly demanding hardware requirements, it’s no surprise that the High Energy Physics community is interested in quantum computing, which offers real solutions to some of their hardest problems. Furthermore, the HEP community is well-positioned to support the early stages of technological development: with budgets in the 10s of billions per year and tens of thousands of scientists and engineers working on accelerator and computational physics, this is a ripe industry for quantum computing to tap.
As the authors of this paper stated: “[Quantum Computing] encompasses several defining characteristics that are of particular interest to experimental HEP: the potential for quantum speed-up in processing time, sensitivity to sources of correlations in data, and increased expressivity of quantum systems... Experiments running on high-luminosity accelerators need faster algorithms; identification and reconstruction algorithms need to capture correlations in signals; simulation and inference tools need to express and calculate functions that are classically intractable”
The authors go on to state: “Within the existing data reconstruction and analysis paradigm, access to algorithms that exhibit quantum speed-ups would revolutionize the simulation of large-scale quantum systems and the processing of data from complex experimental set-ups. This would enable a new generation of precision measurements to probe deeper into the nature of the universe. Existing measurements may contain the signatures of underlying quantum correlations or other sources of new physics that are inaccessible to classical analysis techniques. Quantum algorithms that leverage these properties could potentially extract more information from a given dataset than classical algorithms.”
Our scientists have been working with a team at DESY, one of the world’s leading accelerator centers, to bring the power of quantum computing to particle physics. DESY, short for Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, is a national research center for fundamental science located in Hamburg and Zeuthen, where the Center for Quantum Technologies and Applications (CQTA) is based. DESY operates, develops, and constructs particle accelerators used to investigate the structure, dynamics and function of matter, and conducts a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary scientific research. DESY employs about 3,000 staff members from more than 60 nations, and is part of the worldwide computer network to store and analyze the enormous flood of data that is produced by the LHC in Geneva.
In a recent paper, our scientists collaborated with scientists from DESY, the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), and Northeastern University to explore using a generative quantum machine learning model, called a “quantum Boltzmann machine” to untangle data from CERN’s LHC.
The goal was to learn probability distributions relevant to high energy physics better than the corresponding classical models. The data specifically contains “particle jet events”, which describe how colliders collect data about the subatomic particles generated during the experiments.
In some cases the quantum Boltzmann machine was indeed better, compared to a classical Boltzmann machine. The team is analyzed when and why this happens, understanding better how to apply these new quantum tools in this research setting. The team also studied the effect of the data encoding into a quantum state, noting that it can have a decisive effect on the training performance. Especially enticing is that the quantum Boltzmann machine is efficiently trainable, which our scientists showed in a recent paper published in Nature Communications Physics.
Find the Quantinuum team at this year’s SC24 conference from November 17th – 22nd in Atlanta, Georgia. Meet our team at Booth #4351 to discover how Quantinuum is bridging the gap between quantum computing and high-performance compute with leading industry partners.
The Quantinuum team will be participating various events, panels and poster sessions to showcase our quantum computing technologies. Join us at the below sessions:
Monday, Nov 18, 8:00 - 8:25pm, EST
Panel: KAUST booth 1031
Nash Palaniswamy, Quantinuum’s CCO, will join a panel discussion with quantum vendors and KAUST partners to discuss advancements in quantum technology.
Monday, Nov 18, 9:00 - 11:59pm, EST
Beowulf Bash: World of Coca-Cola
This year, we are proudly sponsoring the Beowulf Bash, a unique event organized to bring the HPC community together for a night of unique entertainment! Join us at the event on Monday, November 18th, 9:00pm at the World of Coca-Cola.
Wednesday, Nov 20, 3:30 – 5:00pm, EST
Panel: Educating for a Hybrid Future: Bridging the Gap between High-Performance and Quantum Computing
Vincent Anandraj, Quantinuum’s Director of Global Ecosystem and Strategic Alliances, will moderate this panel which brings together experts from leading supercomputing centers and the quantum computing industry, including PSC, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, IQM Quantum Computers, NVIDIA, and National Research Foundation.
Thursday, Nov 21, 11:00 – 11:30am, EST
Presentation: Realizing Quantum Kernel Models at Scale with Matrix Product State Simulation
Pablo Andres-Martinez, Research Scientist at Quantinuum, will present research done in collaboration with HSBC, where the team applied quantum methods to fraud detection.