Disruptive Technologies SC07 "The disruptive technologies panel serves as a forum for examining those technologies that may significantly reshape the world of high-performance computing (HPC) in the next five to fifteen years, but which are not common in today's systems. Generally speaking, a disruptive technology is a technological innovation or product that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology or product in the marketplace. Disruptive Technologies showcases these technologies in two panel sessions and in a competitively-selected exhibit showcase." This year's showcase featured quantum computing, optical interconnects, CMOS photonics, carbon nanotube memory, and software for massively-parallel multicore processors. The two panel sessions explored potential for disruptions in each major component of HPC architecture: processors, memory, interconnects, and storage.

Progress in Quantum Computing SC07 Panel discussion and HPCWire summary by DiVincenzo. "Hardware to perform quantum information processing is being developed on many fronts. Representing points of view from academia, government, and industry, this panel will give an indication of how work is progressing on quantum computing devices and systems, and what the theoretical possibilities and limitations are in this quantum arena." Panel members included David DiVincenzo (IBM), Wim Van Dam (UCSB), Mark Heiligman (ODNI), Geordie Rose (∂-wave), and Will Oliver (Lincoln Lab).

Rabi, Ramsey, fidelity, 1/f noise, T₁, T₂ MIT EECS Biercuk (MTO) brings back the "Donald Duck" technical thread calling for further clarification on fidelity, 1/f noise, T₁, T₂ Rabi and Ramsey at the new Vatican. Farhi, Chuang, Shor, and Viola follow-up with the same fundamental questions at Amin and Berkley's MIT talk, covered in further detail by Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized.

    arXivblog, the physics arXiv weblog.

Qulink Seminar on Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation NII|QIS This week's Qulink seminar by Keisuke Fujii (Kyoto) outlines a novel entanglement purification protocol for fault-tolerant quantum computation in the presence of errors. " The protocol works with high noise thresholds for the communication channels and local operations, and achieves high fidelity of purified states. [...] We consider an interesting relationship between the entanglement purification and fault-tolerant computation, which provides a tight upper bound on the noise threshold for fault-tolerant computation. "


Everett @ 50 Oxford Videos, photos and weblog are now online from the Everett@50 conference held in Oxford, 19-21 July. " This year sees the 50th anniversary of the publication of Hugh Everett III’s seminal “Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics.” This is an opportune moment for leading advocates and critics to come together and debate the Everett interpretation. Sponsored by FQXi and hosted in the Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University, forty of the world’s top academics will come together for three days on July 19th, 20th, and 21st to see if Everett’s explanation of quantum mechanics has at last come of age. "

Superconducting flux qubits: CNOT gate. Horizontal axis represents control qubit rotation; ordinate of colour figures sets number of CNOT gates executed (a) (b) Control qubit input state preparation, (c) (d) target qubit state after CNOT pulse. Plantenberg et al. Nature, 15 June 2007.

CNOT gate demonstrated in superconducting flux qubits Kavli|Delft In Nature 447, 836-839 and concurrent reviews in HPCwire, Scientific American, TU Delft [1] [2] (in Dutch), Plantenberg et al. demonstrate selective execution of controlled-NOT quantum logic gates in a pair of coupled flux qubits. "Complemented with longer coherence times and optimized detector visibility, the presented gates enable experiments on two-qubit quantum algorithms and solid-state qubit entanglement using the four Bell states. This scheme, combined with controllable coupling, forms an attractive and generic approach to implementation of solid-state quantum computing." Detailed analysis of controlled rotations, experimental data and conditional spectroscopy are available at doi:10.1028/nature05896.

Teleportation of massive particles without shared entanglement Queensland|Canberra arXiv quant-ph 0706.0062. " We propose a method for quantum state transfer from one atom laser beam to another via an intermediate optical field, using Raman incoupling and outcoupling techniques. Our proposal utilises existing experimental technologies to teleport macroscopic matter waves over potentially large distances without shared entanglement. "