Terra Quantum Will Use Quantum Neural Networks and New Qubits

Terra Quantum is working with leading steel manufacturer POSCO Holdings (top Asian Steel company) to deploy quantum AI for optimizing steel production, specifically focusing on POSCO’s advanced blast furnaces.

They will demonstrate the potential of Quantum Neural Networks to enhance efficiency, targeting tangible outcomes such as reduced emissions and energy consumption.

Terra Quantum researchers were part of a research team that has published a paper on Flowermon qubits.

Potential design for the flowermon qubit. (a) A relative twist of two d-wave flakes placed together to form a Josephson junction can suppress Cooper pair tunneling due to momentum mismatch. At 45° the mismatch completely suppresses single Cooper pair tunneling, and two-pair tunneling dominates the junction. (b) The design of the flowermon with a single d-wave junction shunted by a large capacitor similar to the transmon qubit. The 3D design shows a possible physical implementation with the capacitor pads of a conventional superconductor coupled to the junction. (c) Josephson’s potential for different values of the twist angle.

The Physical Review Letters paper showed how the team used fundamental laws of quantum mechanics to analyze the current flow through a Josephson junction and discovered that if the angle between the crystal lattices of two superconducting cuprate sheets is 45 degrees, the qubit exhibits more resilience to external disturbances compared to conventional designs based on materials like niobium and tantalum.

“The flowermon modernizes the old idea of using unconventional superconductors for protected quantum circuits and combines it with new fabrication techniques and a new understanding of superconducting circuit coherence,” Uri Vool, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Germany.

Superconducting Qubit Based on Twisted Cuprate Van der Waals Heterostructures

Van-der-Waals assembly enables the fabrication of novel Josephson junctions featuring an atomically sharp interface between two exfoliated and relatively twisted flakes. In a range of twist angles around 45°, the junction provides a regime where the interlayer two-Cooper pair tunneling dominates the current-phase relation. Here we propose employing this novel junction to realize a capacitively shunted qubit that we call flowermon. The d-wave nature of the order parameter endows the flowermon with inherent protection against charge-noise-induced relaxation and quasiparticle-induced dissipation. This inherently protected qubit paves the way to a new class of high-coherence hybrid superconducting quantum devices based on unconventional superconductors.