Making atoms march in step

Mark E. Saffman

Robert Pool

Yasunari Suzuki

To scale up quantum computers to a practical size and provide them as a service, the abstraction of computing systems with a large number of quantum bits is a key step towards practical quantum computing.As a milestone to this goal, NTT, RIKEN, and collaborators launched a quantum computing service with 64 quantum bits in March 2023.In this article, NTT's efforts in this development to control a largescale quantum computer and make it a cloud service are described.The configuration of the cloud service and future prospects of quantum computing are also explained.

Di Fang, Lin Lin, Yu Tong

The time-marching strategy, which propagates the solution from one time step to the next, is a natural strategy for solving time-dependent differential equations on classical computers, as well as for solving the Hamiltonian simulation problem on quantum computers. For more general homogeneous linear differential equations ddt|ψ(t)⟩=A(t)|ψ(t)⟩,|ψ(0)⟩=|ψ0⟩ , a time-marching based quantum solver can suffer from exponentially vanishing success probability with respect to the number of time steps and is thus considered impractical. We solve this problem by repeatedly invoking a technique called the uniform singular value amplification, and the overall success probability can be lower bounded by a quantity that is independent of the number of time steps. The success probability can be further improved using a compression gadget lemma. This provides a path of designing quantum differential equation solvers that is alternative to those based on quantum linear systems algorithms (QLSA). We demonstrate the performance of the time-marching strategy with a high-order integrator based on the truncated Dyson series. The complexity of the algorithm depends linearly on the amplification ratio, which quantifies the deviation from a unitary dynamics. We prove that the linear dependence on the amplification ratio attains the query complexity lower bound and thus cannot be improved in the worst case. This algorithm also surpasses existing QLSA based solvers in three aspects: (1) A(t) does not need to be diagonalizable. (2) A(t) can be non-smooth, and is only of bounded variation. (3) It can use fewer queries to the initial state |ψ0⟩ . Finally, we demonstrate the time-marching strategy with a first-order truncated Magnus series, which simplifies the implementation compared to high-order truncated Dyson series approach, while retaining the aforementioned benefits. Our analysis also raises some open questions concerning the differences between time-marching and QLSA based methods for solving differential equations.

Patricia Daukantas

R. L. Shoemaker, William H. Wing

New techniques for making time-resolved studies of atoms in highly excited (Rydberg) states will be developed. In particular, the absorption or emission of radiation by Rydberg-state atoms will be monitored on a nanosecond time scale during and after irradiation by various laser pulse sequences. The signals thus produced (known as coherent transient effects) will be studied in order to provide both information about collisional relaxation processes in Rydberg atoms and other spectroscopic data.