Atlantic Quantum Wins IARPA Contract to Build Entangled Logical Quantum Bits

Cambridge, MA. Atlantic Quantum, the venture-backed startup company building scalable quantum computers, is participating in a quantum computing project financed by IARPA with the goal of connecting two error-corrected quantum bits and thus laying the foundation for future quantum computers.

Science, industry, and society have been eagerly anticipating the advent of useful quantum computers. These hold the promise of solving challenging computational problems that are beyond the capabilities of conventional computers. But so far, their susceptibility to errors has limited their use to a handful of highly specialized, often pathological tasks.

In the past few years, researchers have been able to demonstrate the correction of errors in quantum systems using error-correction techniques. In one case, they achieved this with the help of a chip featuring 17 physical quantum bits (qubits) connected to form one logical qubit. By using multiple physical qubits to encode the logical qubit redundantly, the logical qubit’s quantum state persisted for longer than the states of its constituent qubits.

The goal of the IARPA project is to go one step further and entangle two logical qubits and transfer the quantum state of one logical qubit to the other.  The project is led by Professor Andreas Wallraff at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and is a collaboration between researchers at ETH, Atlantic Quantum, MIT, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, the Université de Sherbrooke, Canada and Zurich Instruments, Switzerland.

“Atlantic Quantum is committed to building quantum computing hardware that can tackle the world’s hardest computational challenges.  The goals of the IARPA project to demonstrate operations on logical quantum bits align very well with our objective to develop error-corrected quantum computers that can scale to real-world applications,” says Simon Gustavsson, CTO of Atlantic Quantum and Principal Investigator on the IARPA project.  “We are pleased to see the U.S. government committing resources to quantum error correction, which is crucial to fault-tolerant, large-scale operation of quantum processors.”

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of IARPA or the U.S. government.