Quantinuum's Solid Progress Revealed

Microsoft and Quantinuum create 12 logical qubits

Hey Everyone,

The PR out of Quantinuum appears very solid to me. Quantinuum is a quantum computing company formed by the merger of Cambridge Quantum and Honeywell Quantum Solutions.

Honeywell is itself an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. If you want exposure to Quantinuum but don’t want to take much risk, its stock HON 0.00%↑ is incredibly stable. They have a market cap of $133.36 Bn. So this is a diversified high-tech company that inspires confidence. For instance, Honeywell makes money through its diverse business segments, including Aerospace, Building Technologies, Performance Materials and Technologies, and Safety and Productivity Solutions. The Aerospace segment is particularly significant, contributing a substantial portion of the company's revenue.

On April 3, 2024, Quantinuum and Microsoft announced a major achievement in quantum computing by demonstrating the most reliable logical qubits to date. Recently this progress has made serious strides. Quantinuum successfully teleported a logical qubit using fault-tolerant methods on its H2 trapped-ion quantum processor, achieving a fidelity of 97.5%.

Their partnership with Microsoft appears like a good combination of teams. So much so that Microsoft shared September PR about it.

Microsoft and Quantinuum create 12 logical qubits and demonstrate a hybrid, end-to-end chemistry simulation.

Quantinuum with long time partner Microsoft the demonstration of a 12 Logical qubit GHZ state on our H2 machine (with 56 physical qubits); showing the logical qubit entangled state had 22x higher fidelity that the equivalent physical qubit entangled state. We announced demonstration of 5x repeated rounds of error correction with 8 logical qubits, for the first time showing fault-tolerant computation during error correction and the logical circuit performing 8x better than the physical circuit.

Microsoft Quantum itself announced using their H1 computer to demonstrate end-to-end hybrid AI/HPC/Quantum workflow. Read the Microsoft paper here: (Sept 9th, 2024):

My source is here Sebby Strabley. With Microsoft they compared two teleportation techniques, transversal gates and lattice surgery, highlighting the advantages of logical qubits, which are error-corrected and more stable than physical qubits. Using Quantinuum’s ion-trap hardware and Microsoft’s new qubit-virtualization system, the team was able to run more than 14,000 experiments without a single error. This new system also allowed the team to check the logical qubits and correct any errors it encountered without destroying the logical qubits.

The companies claim the work lays the groundwork for more reliable quantum communication networks and scalable quantum computing systems, critical for complex tasks like cryptography and material science.

The company's H-Series trapped-ion quantum computers set the highest quantum volume to date of 1,048,576 in April 2024. This architecture supports all-to-all qubit connectivity, allowing entangled states to be created between all qubits, and enables a high fidelity of quantum states.

So how else are they working with Microsoft Quantum? Quantinuum and Microsoft announced that InQuanto, their computational quantum chemistry software toolkit, will be integrated into Azure Quantum Elements and available in private preview.

So not only did Microsoft and Quantinuum reported the ability to create 12 logical qubits on Quantinuum’s H2 trapped ion system this week and also reported using two logical qubits on an H1 system to simulate an iron catalyst’s low energy state. There’s plenty of tangible momentum here. Their end of the decade goals really excite me as a lay analyst onlooker.

Furthermore, they released additional results on our continued quest for showing how Quantum Computing can contribute to the effectiveness of AI. Here is an accessible blog which contains Arxiv links to the technical results:

“How can quantum structures and quantum computers contribute to the effectiveness of AI?”

As someone with multiple AI Newsletters and a semiconductor Newsletter, you can imagine this interests me too.

Microsoft posted two blogs on the work, one focused on the increasing logical qubit count and a second focused on the catalyst use case experiment.

“Merely increasing the number of physical qubits with a high error rate — without improving that error rate — is futile because doing so would result in a large quantum computer that is not any more powerful than before,” Dennis Tom, the general manager for Azure Quantum, and Krysta Svore, the VP of Advanced Quantum Development at Microsoft, wrote in today’s announcement. “In contrast, when physical qubits with sufficient quality of operation are used with a specialized orchestration-and-diagnostics system to enable virtual qubits, only then does increasing the number of physical qubits result in powerful, fault-tolerant quantum computers able to perform longer, more complex computation.”

This research could, for example, help scientists develop more reliable quantum communication networks by allowing the teleportation of qubits across long distances, supporting secure data transfer.

For 2024, this is some of the most tangible progress I’ve seen by any of the various international teams and Quantum startups. Check out their new website. Honeywell is such a solid hi-tech corporation it gives me more confidence when progress is made by such a team. Honeywell's largest segment in Aerospace itself, contributes approximately 32% to the company's total revenue. It includes products and services for commercial aviation, defense, and space applications. It’s not clear to me how their Quantum portfolio will become profitable or generate revenue yet. Still they are developing real products:

What is Apollo? Apollo Quantum Computer

Quantinuum is committed to continually advancing the capabilities of our hardware over prior generations, and Apollo makes good on that promise. It will offer:

• thousands of physical qubits

• physical error rates less than 10^-4

• All of our most competitive features: all-to-all connectivity, low crosstalk, mid-circuit measurement and qubit re-use

• Conditional logic

• Real-time classical co-compute

• Physical variable angle 1 qubit and 2 qubit gates

• Hundreds of logical qubits

• Logical error rates better than 10^-6 with analysis based on recent literature estimating as low as 10^-10

In the study, the researchers report their teleportation protocol achieved a fidelity of 0.975 ± 0.002, a measurement indicating the accuracy of the state transfer between qubits. Teleportation, in the quantum realm, refers to transferring a quantum state from one qubit to another without physically moving the qubits.

The teleportation was implemented in two ways: using transversal gates and lattice surgery, two different techniques for manipulating logical qubits. Transversal gates operate by applying operations to multiple qubits simultaneously, while lattice surgery is a quantum computing technique that manipulates qubit boundaries to perform operations, an approach that may be more compatible with certain hardware architectures.

Quantinuum’s trapped-ion quantum processor also played a pivotal role in these experiments. The architecture, which offers all-to-all connectivity, allowed the team to implement complex error correction routines with minimal delay, a feature critical to maintaining fault tolerance. The processor used real-time decoding to apply error corrections at four stages during the teleportation protocol, including mid-circuit measurements.

Later in September, they announced yet more.

Honeywell to Develop Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Agent Powered by Qualcomm

The agent will allow workers and customers in the distribution center and retail industries to interact naturally with their handheld devices through voice, pictures, and barcodes. That’s some real-world application! Which frankly, is what I’m most interested in at the end of the day.

As we follow Quantum computing: It was only a couple of years ago that logical qubits started outperforming physical qubits. Now, Microsoft and Quantinuum argue that their new hardware/software system demonstrates the largest gap between physical and logical error rates, improving on using only physical qubits by up to 800x.

OK, what is a Logical Qubit?

A Logical Qubit, according to QuEra, refers to a qubit that is encoded using a collection of physical qubits to protect against errors. Unlike a physical qubit, which represents the actual quantum hardware, a logical qubit is a higher-level abstraction used in fault-tolerant quantum computing. It provides a way to perform reliable quantum computations even in the presence of noise and errors.

Logical qubits are central to quantum error correction schemes, where multiple physical qubits are entangled to encode a single logical qubit. This encoding allows errors in individual physical qubits to be detected and corrected without disturbing the information stored in the logical qubit. For example, a common encoding might use seven physical qubits to represent one logical qubit, allowing for the correction of certain types of errors.

Logical qubits are essential for building large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers. While current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices often operate directly on physical qubits, future quantum computers will likely rely on logical qubits to perform complex computations accurately. By providing a layer of protection against errors, logical qubits enable more robust and reliable quantum information processing. Read more.

So that’s my little summary of Quantinuum progress. Will they be able to scale Quantinuum Apollo™, a machine that delivers scientific advantage and a commercial tipping point this decade? I like when solid companies make bold predictions and my enthusiasm of this team is growing compared to some of the other major players.

Writing about the experiment, Krysta Svore, Technical Fellow, Advanced Quantum Development, Quantum at Microsoft wrote,“The proof-of-concept case study described here is notable for several reasons. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an end-to-end workflow that employs quantum computing, HPC, and AI to simulate and solve a chemistry problem.

It is their hope and my hope that ultimately by implementing teleportation in a fault-tolerant manner, Quantinuum’s research brings the field closer to practical, large-scale quantum computing systems. Because frankly I don’t have infinite patience to wait for emerging technologies to show proof of concept in the real world.

It is hoped that Logical qubit teleportation would therefore be integral for scientists who want to build scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computers. Since we don’t yet have such workable scalable computers, we can’t truly say the Quantum era has officially begun yet. Just like commercial AGI in Generative AI marks a new beginning for new capabilities in AI, these are basic foundational technologies that need to have an architecture that is ready. Decades of work and thousands of PhDs go into this.

Think if the technologies that need to work together here. Microsoft reports an end-to-end hybrid workflow was used, bringing together computation across cloud HPC, reliable quantum computing, and AI. What will Generative AI along with real Quantum computers be able to achieve and do for science, R&D and new discoveries? Those are the kinds of tangible ends we need to always keep in mind.