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Scientists achieve direct experimental realization of dual-type entangling gates

To develop scalable and reliable quantum computers, engineers and physicists will need to devise effective strategies to mitigate errors in their quantum systems without adding complex additional components. A promising strategy to reduce errors entails the use of so-called dual-type qubits.

These are qubits that can encode in a system across two different types of quantum states. These qubits could increase the flexibility of quantum computing architectures, while also reducing undesirable crosstalk between qubits and enhancing a system’s operational fidelity.

Researchers at Tsinghua University and other research institutes in China recently realized an entangling gate between dual-type qubits in an experimental setting.

Fighting Antibiotic Resistance with Computer-Driven Precision Medicine

How can computer models help medical professionals combat antibiotic resistance? This is what a recent study published in PLOS Biology hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Virginia (UVA) developed computer models that can be used to target specific genes in bacteria to combat antimicrobial resistant (AMR) bacteria. This study has the potential to help scientists, medical professionals, and the public better understand innovative methods that can be used to combat AMR with bacterial diseases constantly posing a risk to global human health.

For the study, the researchers used computer models to produce an assemblage of genome-scale metabolic network reconstructions (GENREs) diseases to identify key genes in stomach diseases that can be targeted with antibiotics to circumvent AMR in these bacterial diseases. The researchers validated their findings with laboratory experiments involving microbial samples and found that a specific gene was responsible for producing stomach diseases, thus strengthening the argument for using targeted antibiotics to combat AMR.

“Using our computer models we found that the bacteria living in the stomach had unique properties,” said Emma Glass, who is a PhD Candidate in Biomedical Engineering at UVA and lead author of the study. “These properties can be used to guide design of targeted antibiotics, which could hopefully one day slow the emergence of resistant infections.”

NVIDIA GTC 2025: Quantum Day to Illuminate the Future of Quantum Computing

It’s expected that the technology will tackle myriad problems that were once deemed impractical or even impossible to solve. Quantum computing promises huge leaps forward for fields spanning drug discovery and materials development to financial forecasting.

But just as exciting as quantum computing’s future are the breakthroughs already being made today in quantum hardware, error correction and algorithms.

NVIDIA is celebrating and exploring this remarkable progress in quantum computing by announcing its first Quantum Day at GTC 2025 on Thursday, March 20. This new focus area brings together leading experts for a comprehensive and balanced perspective on what businesses should expect from quantum computing in the coming decades — mapping the path toward useful quantum applications.

Engineering Hierarchical Symmetries

Symmetry plays a crucial role in understanding fundamental phenomena such as conservation laws, the classification of phases of matter, and their transitions. Recently, researchers have been exploring ways to manipulate symmetries in quantum many-body systems with time-dependent driving protocols and, in particular, engineering new symmetries that do not naturally occur. This significantly enriches the toolbox for quantum simulation and computation, and has led to many exciting discoveries of nonequilibrium phases such as discrete time crystals. However, controlling multiple symmetries—especially in a simple and experimentally friendly way—has remained a challenge. In this work, we propose a novel method to engineer hierarchical symmetries by time-dependent protocols.

By carefully controlling how symmetry-indicating observables evolve over time, we show how to create a sequence of symmetries that emerge one after another, each with distinct properties. Our method relies on a recursive construction that hierarchically minimizes the effects of symmetry-breaking processes. This leads to a corresponding sequence of prethermal steady states with controllable lifetimes, each exhibiting a lower symmetry than the preceding one. We illustrate this protocol with several examples, demonstrating how different types of order can emerge through hierarchical symmetry breaking.

This toolbox of hierarchical symmetries opens a new path to stabilizing quantum states and controlling unwanted symmetry-breaking effects, which can be particularly useful in quantum computing and quantum simulation. The construction applies to classical and quantum, fermionic and bosonic, interacting and noninteracting systems. The underlying mechanism generalizes state-of-the-art dynamical decoupling techniques and is implementable on present-day quantum simulation platforms.

Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 Launch to the Moon (Official NASA Broadcast)

Watch Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX and Firefly Aerospace are targeting 1:11 a.m. EST (0611 UTC) Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025, for launch. The lander will carry 10 NASA science investigations to the Moon’s surface.

Following launch, the lander will spend approximately 45 days in transit to the Moon before landing on the lunar surface in early March 2025. The 10 NASA payloads aboard the lander aim to test and demonstrate lunar subsurface drilling technology, regolith sample collection capabilities, global navigation satellite system abilities, radiation tolerant computing, and lunar dust mitigation methods.

The results of these investigations could help further our understanding of the Moon’s environment and help prepare for future human missions to the lunar surface as part of the agency’s Moon to Mars exploration approach.

For more information about our Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/commercial-lunar

Credit: NASA

#NASA #Moon #Artemis

New framework designs scalable 3D transistors based on 2D semiconductors

The operation and performance of quantum computers relies on the ability to realize and control entanglement between multiple qubits. Yet entanglement between many qubits is inherently susceptible to noise and imperfections in quantum gates.

In recent years, and engineers worldwide have thus been trying to develop more robust protocols to realize and control entanglement. To be most effective for real-world applications, these approaches should reliably support long-range entanglement, or in other words ensure that qubits remain entangled even when they are separated by large distances.

Researchers at IBM Quantum, University of Cologne and Harvard University set out to demonstrate one of these protocols in an experimental setting.

Fast control methods enable record-setting fidelity in superconducting qubit

Quantum computing promises to solve complex problems exponentially faster than a classical computer, by using the principles of quantum mechanics to encode and manipulate information in quantum bits (qubits).

Qubits are the building blocks of a quantum computer. One challenge to scaling, however, is that qubits are highly sensitive to background noise and control imperfections, which introduce errors into the quantum operations and ultimately limit the complexity and duration of a quantum algorithm. To improve the situation, MIT researchers and researchers worldwide have continually focused on improving qubit performance.

In new work, using a superconducting qubit called fluxonium, MIT researchers in the Department of Physics, the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) developed two new control techniques to achieve a world-record single-qubit fidelity of 99.998%. This result complements then-MIT researcher Leon Ding’s demonstration last year of a 99.92% two-qubit gate fidelity.

Quantum computer helps to answer questions on lattice gauge theory

Science is always looking for more computing power and more efficient tools capable of answering its questions. Quantum computers are the new frontier in data processing, as they use the quantum properties of matter, such as the superposition of states and entanglement, to perform very complex operations.

A research team coordinated by the Department of Physics of the University of Trento had the opportunity to test some hypotheses on confinement in Z2 lattice gauge theory on the quantum computers of Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, in California. Their work was published in Nature Physics.

Gauge theories describe the fundamental forces in the and play an important role in condensed matter physics. The constituents of gauge theories, such as charged matter and electric gauge field, are governed by local gauge constraints, which lead to key phenomena that are not yet fully understood. In this context, quantum simulators may offer solutions that cannot be reached using conventional computers.

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