Xanadu Quantum Technologies has built a prototype of the world’s first universal photonic quantum computer.
Dubbed Aurora, the 12-qubit machine is the successor to the company’s previous quantum computers, X8 and Borealis.
Aurora consists of four photonically interconnected modular and independent server racks, containing 35 photonic chips and 13km of fiber optics. The system operates at room temperature and is fully automated, which Xanadu says makes it capable of running “for hours without any human intervention.”
The company added that in principle, Aurora could be scaled up to “thousands of server racks and millions of qubits today, realizing the ultimate goal of a quantum data center.”
In a blog post detailing Aurora, Xanadu CTO Zachary Vernon said the machine represents the “very first time [Xanadu] – or anyone else for that matter – have combined all the subsystems necessary to implement universal and fault-tolerant quantum computation in a photonic architecture.”
This includes qubit generation and multiplexing, synthesis of a cluster state with both temporal and spatial entanglement, logic gates, and real-time error correction and decoding operations that are executed within a single quantum clock cycle.
Xanadu said a full description of the system has been published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.
"The two big challenges remaining for the industry are the improved performance of the quantum computer (error correction and fault tolerance) and scalability (networking). Xanadu has now solved scalability," said Christian Weedbrook, the founder and CEO of Xanadu. "Photonics really is the best and most natural way to both compute and network. We now could, in principle, scale up to thousands of server racks and millions of qubits, but first we will focus on performance in reducing loss and being fault tolerant."
Founded in 2016, in January 2023, Xanadu raised C$40 million (US$27m) from the Canadian government’s Strategic Innovation Fund to build and commercialize photonic-based, fault-tolerant quantum computers. Prior to that, the company closed a US$100 million Series C funding round in November 2022.
In other quantum computing news:
-XeedQ has delivered three of its XQ1 quantum computers to All About Quarks, a Dresden, Germany-based project that explores the role of quantum computing in 6G for research and educational purposes.
According to a LinkedIn post from XeedQ co-founder and CEO Gopalakrishnan Balasubramanian, employees from both organizations “teamed up to build a quantum kit that interactively and intuitively, provide hands-on-experiences on superposition, entanglement, and the nature of quantum properties.”
On its website, XeedQ describes the five-qubit XQ1 machine as “the first multi-qubit mobile quantum processor that is room-temperature operable, energy-efficient, green, and… affordable.”
-SoftBank has partnered with Quantinuum to accelerate the practical use of quantum computing.
According to the two companies, the partnership will focus on two main objectives: Developing a quantum data center that integrates CPUs, GPUs, and quantum processing units (QPUs), and establishing clear timelines for quantum applications.
“By combining their respective strengths, both companies will unlock innovative quantum computing solutions that will overcome the limitations of classical artificial intelligence (AI) and realize next-generation technologies,” a statement posted on Quantinuum’s website read.