ColdQuanta said it has achieved a quantum computing milestone by trapping and addressing 100 qubits in a large, dense 2-D cold atom array. Scheduled for availability later this year, the digital gate-based quantum computer (“Hilbert”) will use pristine qubits that have the stability of atomic clocks, according to the company, to massively scale qubit count beyond what is possible with other quantum computing approaches.
“The successful achievement of this milestone demonstrates the potential for the ColdQuanta platform to rapidly scale towards solving real world problems with commercial impact,” the company said in its announcement. “The scalability of Hilbert will enable ColdQuanta to solve important customer computation problems more rapidly and with greater efficiency in environments where optimization is critical, such as financial services, logistics and pharmaceuticals, as well as the mainstream delivery of quantum computing as a cloud service (QaaS). During testing, these qubit counts and connectivity scaled extremely well wherein large, dense 2-D arrays of qubits were trapped and manipulated with lasers.”
ColdQuanta said Hilbert is based on work over the last several decades by Mark Saffman, ColdQuanta’s chief scientist for quantum information and professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Cold atoms are nature’s qubits,” Saffman said. “Their pristine characteristics enable control of their quantum state with a clear pathway to rapidly scaling to multiple thousands of qubits.”
The company said 2021 has been a significant year, including several key leadership appointments with the addition of Paul Lipman as President of Quantum Computing, Rushton McGarr as Chief Financial Officer and Dan Caruso as Interim Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman. ColdQuanta has also been awarded multi-million dollar U.S. government contracts and announced participation in the High-BIAS2 (High Bandwidth Inertial Atom Source) project wherein ColdQuanta’s Cold Atom Quantum Technology serves as the foundation for the project’s gyroscope and Quantum Positioning System (QPS).
“Today’s continued progress represents the completion of a critical step in bringing our Cold Atom Quantum Technology to market and showcasing its potential to support a variety of practical use cases,” said Lipman. “Our Cold Atom Method stands out among other modalities by demonstrating the potential for unmatched qubit scalability. We are on the brink of delivering a compelling platform and on the doorstep of commercialization.”
