IonQ Trapped Ion Computers in US and Quantum Computers In Europe

The EU has a one billion euro ten-year project to develop Quantum technologies.

The EU has a long-term plan for a Quantum Web. A Quantum Web would have Quantum computers, simulators and sensors interconnected via quantum networks distributing information and quantum resources such as coherence and entanglement. The EU does not expect to complete a Quantum Web within ten years.

The performance increase resulting from Quantum Technologies will yield unprecedented computing power, guarantee data privacy and communication security, and provide ultra-high precision synchronization and measurements for a range of applications available to everyone locally and in the cloud.

There is a 9.6 million euro project (called AQTION) to create a 50 qubit trapped ion quantum computer by 2021.

There is a startup IonQ which received approximately $22 million in funding who announced a 79 qubit trapped ion system in Dec 2018.

Highlights From the Nextbigfuture Interview with Stewart Allen

* IonQ systems are at room temperature
* IonQ manipulates ions with magnets and lasers and have software control on mostly FPGA chips
* IonQ are like atomic clocks, they do not have time limiting decoherence
* IonQ can invent and make any kind of quantum gate. It is a matter of software and tuning laser pulses.
* There are no errors from the fabrication of the qubits as the qubits are ions and not Josephson junctions.
* There are no idle errors, no readout errors and no qubit lifetime problem
* They could make 100-200 qubit modules and link them with optical interconnects.
* They can have modular scaling which is not possible or practical with the superconducting systems. Superconducting quantum systems need extreme cooling. This cooling limits the size of the systems
* Superconducting systems had proposed or were using access via a remote cloud computing submission of problems.
* IonQ will have quantum systems at specialized data centers and then at regular data centers. The reason for data centers is because the quantum systems generate so much data. You get more benefit by pairing them with a lot of classical computers to process the data.
* IonQ has a path to optical networking.
* IonQ has a confident path to scaling to thousands of qubits. They believe the error rates will let them get to thousands of qubits before error correction is needed.
* Error correction means you need a thousand times more qubits to get a number of useful error corrected qubits. You would need say one billion qubits to get to one million error corrected qubits.

In May, IonQ announced Peter Chapman joined the company as the President and Chief Executive Officer.

IonQ quantum cores use lasers pointed at individual atoms to perform longer, more sophisticated calculations with fewer errors than any quantum computer yet built. In 2019, leading companies will start investigating real-world problems in chemistry, medicine, finance, logistics, and more using our systems

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