In a milestone that brings quantum computing tangibly closer to large-scale practical use, scientists at Oxford University Physics have demonstrated the first instance of distributed quantum computing. Using a photonic network interface, they successfully linked two separate quantum processors to form a single, fully connected quantum computer, paving the way to tackling computational challenges previously out of reach. The results have been published today in Nature.

The EQUSPACE consortium, led by the University of Jyväskylä, has been awarded 3.2 million euros from the European Innovation Council’s (EIC) Pathfinder Open funding programme to pioneer quantum technologies in silicon. The project brings together five partners from three EU countries to develop a new type of silicon quantum platform.

Today, at the EuroHPC User Day 2024 in Amsterdam, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking announced the selection of SURF to host and operate a new European quantum computer, in coordination with QuantumDelta NL. The system will be located at the Amsterdam Science Park and integrated into the Dutch national supercomputer, Snellius.

The U.S. National Science Foundation is investing $39 million to help grow quantum research activities at more institutions across America through the NSF Expanding Capacity in Quantum Information Science and Engineering (ExpandQISE) program. This investment will fund 23 research projects aiming to break new ground in fields such as quantum computing, sensors and materials.

Three promising projects led by INRS professors will receive $7.4 million in funding over the next few years. These initiatives aim to enhance quantum communication, computing, and sensing capabilities by integrating photonics and quantum technologies.

A team of Rice University researchers has developed a new way to control light interactions using a specially engineered structure called a 3D photonic-crystal cavity. Their work, published in the journal Nature Communications, lays the foundation for technologies that could enable transformative advancements in quantum computing, quantum communication and other quantum-based technologies.

The research team led by Professor Chang-Hee Cho from the Department of Physics and Chemistry at DGIST (President Kunwoo Lee) has successfully fine-tuned the Rabi oscillation of polaritons, quantum composite particles, by leveraging changes in electrical properties induced by crystal structure transformation. This study demonstrates that the properties of quantum particles can be controlled without the need for complex external devices, which is expected to greatly enhance the feasibility of practical quantum technology.

Research teams led by Prof. PAN Jianwei, LU Chaoyang, HU Yongheng, and others have realized a high-performance single-photon source with an efficiency beyond the scalable linear optical quantum computing loss tolerance threshold for the first time, and the comprehensive indicators have reached the international advanced level. The results were published in Nature Photonics on February 28th.

Philip Kurian, a theoretical physicist and founding director of the Quantum Biology Laboratory (QBL) at Howard University in Washington, D.C., has used the laws of quantum mechanics, which Schrödinger postulated, and the QBL’s discovery of cytoskeletal filaments exhibiting quantum optical features, to set a drastically revised upper bound on the computational capacity of carbon-based life in the entire history of Earth. Published in Science Advances, Kurian’s latest work conjectures a relationship between this information-processing limit and that of all matter in the observable universe.

Christine Muschik, a research associate faculty member at Perimeter Institute and a professor at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing, is working at the frontier of quantum computing today – using not just “qubits” that are represented as superpositions of zeros and ones, but with multi-level “qudits” that go well beyond the binary qubit realm.