Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) technology will be available in the near future. Quantum computers with 50-100 qubits may be able to perform tasks which surpass the capabilities of today's classical digital computers, but noise in quantum gates will limit the size of quantum circuits that can be executed reliably. NISQ devices will be useful tools for exploring many-body quantum physics, and may have other useful applications, but the 100-qubit quantum computer will not change the world right away --- we should regard it as a significant step toward the more powerful quantum technologies of the future. Quantum technologists should continue to strive for more accurate quantum gates and, eventually, fully fault-tolerant quantum computing.

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Quantum Computing in the NISQ era and beyond

Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) technology will be available in the
near future. Quantum computers with 50-100 qubits may be able to perform tasks
which surpass the capabilities of today's classical digital computers, but
noise in quantum gates will limit the size of quantum circuits that can be
executed reliably. NISQ devices will be useful tools for exploring many-body
quantum physics, and may have other useful applications, but the 100-qubit
quantum computer will not change the world right away --- we should regard it
as a significant step toward the more powerful quantum technologies of the
future. Quantum technologists should continue to strive for more accurate
quantum gates and, eventually, fully fault-tolerant quantum computing.

/pdf/quantum-computing-in-the-nisq-era-and-beyond-3utyn832f7.pdf

The internet-a vast network that enables simultaneous long-range classical communication-has had a revolutionary impact on our world. The vision of a quantum internet is to fundamentally enhance internet technology by enabling quantum communication between any two points on Earth. Such a quantum internet may operate in parallel to the internet that we have today and connect quantum processors in order to achieve capabilities that are provably impossible by using only classical means. Here, we propose stages of development toward a full-blown quantum internet and highlight experimental and theoretical progress needed to attain them.

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Quantum internet: A vision for the road ahead

Quantum computing becomes viable when a quantum state can be protected from environment-induced error. If quantum bits (qubits) are sufficiently reliable, errors are sparse and quantum error correction (QEC) is capable of identifying and correcting them. Adding more qubits improves the preservation of states by guaranteeing that increasingly larger clusters of errors will not cause logical failure-a key requirement for large-scale systems. Using QEC to extend the qubit lifetime remains one of the outstanding experimental challenges in quantum computing. Here we report the protection of classical states from environmental bit-flip errors and demonstrate the suppression of these errors with increasing system size. We use a linear array of nine qubits, which is a natural step towards the two-dimensional surface code QEC scheme, and track errors as they occur by repeatedly performing projective quantum non-demolition parity measurements. Relative to a single physical qubit, we reduce the failure rate in retrieving an input state by a factor of 2.7 when using five of our nine qubits and by a factor of 8.5 when using all nine qubits after eight cycles. Additionally, we tomographically verify preservation of the non-classical Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state. The successful suppression of environment-induced errors will motivate further research into the many challenges associated with building a large-scale superconducting quantum computer.

State preservation by repetitive error detection in a superconducting quantum circuit

One of the most promising suggested applications of quantum computing is solving classically intractable chemistry problems. This may help to answer unresolved questions about phenomena such as high temperature superconductivity, solid-state physics, transition metal catalysis, and certain biochemical reactions. In turn, this increased understanding may help us to refine, and perhaps even one day design, new compounds of scientific and industrial importance. However, building a sufficiently large quantum computer will be a difficult scientific challenge. As a result, developments that enable these problems to be tackled with fewer quantum resources should be considered important. Driven by this potential utility, quantum computational chemistry is rapidly emerging as an interdisciplinary field requiring knowledge of both quantum computing and computational chemistry. This review provides a comprehensive introduction to both computational chemistry and quantum computing, bridging the current knowledge gap. Major developments in this area are reviewed, with a particular focus on near-term quantum computation. Illustrations of key methods are provided, explicitly demonstrating how to map chemical problems onto a quantum computer, and how to solve them. The review concludes with an outlook on this nascent field.

Quantum computational chemistry

The highest two-qubit gate fidelities have been demonstrated in two experiments that use scalable trapped ion platforms.

High-Fidelity Quantum Logic Gates Using Trapped-Ion Hyperfine Qubits.

Qubits based on trapped ions can be prepared and manipulated with record-breaking accuracy, offering a promising scalable platform for quantum computing.

https://physics.aps.org/featured-article-pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.220501

High-Fidelity Preparation, Gates, Memory, and Readout of a Trapped-Ion Quantum Bit.

Quantum bits (qubits) based on individual trapped atomic ions are a promising technology for building a quantum computer. The elementary operations necessary to do so have been achieved with the required precision for some error-correction schemes. However, the essential two-qubit logic gate that is used to generate quantum entanglement has hitherto always been performed in an adiabatic regime (in which the gate is slow compared with the characteristic motional frequencies of the ions in the trap), resulting in logic speeds of the order of 10 kilohertz. There have been numerous proposals of methods for performing gates faster than this natural 'speed limit' of the trap. Here we implement one such method, which uses amplitude-shaped laser pulses to drive the motion of the ions along trajectories designed so that the gate operation is insensitive to the optical phase of the pulses. This enables fast (megahertz-rate) quantum logic that is robust to fluctuations in the optical phase, which would otherwise be an important source of experimental error. We demonstrate entanglement generation for gate times as short as 480 nanoseconds-less than a single oscillation period of an ion in the trap and eight orders of magnitude shorter than the memory coherence time measured in similar calcium-43 hyperfine qubits. The power of the method is most evident at intermediate timescales, at which it yields a gate error more than ten times lower than can be attained using conventional techniques; for example, we achieve a 1.6-microsecond-duration gate with a fidelity of 99.8 per cent. Faster and higher-fidelity gates are possible at the cost of greater laser intensity. The method requires only a single amplitude-shaped pulse and one pair of beams derived from a continuous-wave laser. It offers the prospect of combining the unrivalled coherence properties, operation fidelities and optical connectivity of trapped-ion qubits with the submicrosecond logic speeds that are usually associated with solid-state devices.

Fast quantum logic gates with trapped-ion qubits.

We demonstrate a two-qubit logic gate driven by near-field microwaves in a room-temperature microfabricated surface ion trap. We introduce a dynamically decoupled gate method, which stabilizes the qubits against fluctuating energy shifts and avoids the need to null the microwave field. We use the gate to produce a Bell state with fidelity 99.7(1)%, after accounting for state preparation and measurement errors. The gate is applied directly to ^{43}Ca^{+} hyperfine "atomic clock" qubits (coherence time T_{2}^{*}≈50  s) using the oscillating magnetic field gradient produced by an integrated microwave electrode.

High-Fidelity Trapped-Ion Quantum Logic Using Near-Field Microwaves

We demonstrate remote entanglement of trapped-ion qubits via a quantum-optical fiber link with fidelity and rate approaching those of local operations. Two ^{88}Sr^{+} qubits are entangled via the polarization degree of freedom of two spontaneously emitted 422 nm photons which are coupled by high-numerical-aperture lenses into single-mode optical fibers and interfere on a beam splitter. A novel geometry allows high-efficiency photon collection while maintaining unit fidelity for ion-photon entanglement. We generate heralded Bell pairs with fidelity 94% at an average rate 182 s^{-1} (success probability 2.18×10^{-4}).

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C. J. Ballance

Papers

High-Fidelity Quantum Logic Gates Using Trapped-Ion Hyperfine Qubits.

High-Fidelity Preparation, Gates, Memory, and Readout of a Trapped-Ion Quantum Bit.

Fast quantum logic gates with trapped-ion qubits.

High-Fidelity Trapped-Ion Quantum Logic Using Near-Field Microwaves

High-Rate, High-Fidelity Entanglement of Qubits Across an Elementary Quantum Network.