OAKLAND,
CALIF :
A brand new quantum laptop startup born from researchers at Harvard College and Massachusetts Institute of Expertise (MIT) referred to as QuEra Computing mentioned on Wednesday it raised $17 million from traders, together with Japanese e-commerce large Rakuten Inc.
It’s the newest quantum laptop {hardware} maker to come back out of the lab at a time when funding for the nascent know-how is booming.
Whereas there are numerous applied sciences for creating so-called quantum bits or qubits the place the computations occur, QuEra’s qubits use impartial atoms in a vacuum chamber and use lasers to chill and management them.
“From 2015 once we had an empty lab with nothing to 2017, the work that we have been doing at Harvard and MIT, we have been already on the stage the place we might management 51 of those impartial atom qubits,” mentioned Alex Keesling, QuEra CEO and co-inventor of the know-how. He mentioned this know-how was straightforward to scale up and that QuEra would have a 1000-qubit laptop in two years. In the present day it has a 256-qubit machine, he mentioned.
Worldwide Enterprise Machines Corp, whose quantum computer systems are already obtainable by way of the cloud, is aiming for a 1000-plus qubit machine in 2023. Though it is arduous to match the efficiency of the completely different machines simply primarily based on the variety of qubits, say a number of researchers of quantum computer systems.
For these seeking to check out the QuEra machine, Keesling mentioned the aim is to make it obtainable by way of the cloud by the third quarter of subsequent yr.
Whereas there’s some debate about when quantum computer systems will be capable to crack real-world issues, researchers imagine quantum computer systems might function tens of millions of occasions sooner than as we speak’s superior supercomputers, probably making potential duties similar to mapping complicated molecular buildings and chemical reactions to boosting the ability of synthetic intelligence.
Supply: Live Mint