Quera has raised US$230 million in funding, one of the biggest single investments in any quantum company.Credit: Quera Computing Inc.
Technology once feared that quantum computers were so error-prone that they couldn’t spend much time.
Quera, an academic spinout company that uses atoms and lasers to encode qubits or “Qubits,” announced on February 11 that it had raised US$230 million in funding. Other companies using similar technologies to build machines (called neutral atom quantum computers) are also benefiting industry leaders such as IBM.
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Neutral Atom Technology is “catching up,” says Doug Finke, a computer scientist who works for Global Quantum Intelligence, a business analytics firm in Orange County, California. “As far as we know, this is the biggest venture investment of a neutral company.”
Neutral atoms are stable and can remain in quantum state without bulky cooling systems. These are the features that create great Qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers that correspond to classic information. However, for years, advances in neutral atom quantum computing have been hampered by how accurately physicists can guide particles to perform calculations.
Quantum Race
Advances in the way of constructing and controlling atoms since 2019 mean that operations are approaching the accuracy of other hardware types. “Over the past few years, we’ve seen a big breakthrough,” says Wenchao Xu, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Zurich. “There’s definitely a lot of excitement.”
Atom-based quantum computers are catching up with companies like IONQ and Google that use trapped ions or small superconducting circuits to represent quantum states. Kera in Boston, Massachusetts is not solely in the pursuit of neutral atomic technology. Atomic Computing in Berkeley, California, Inflection in Boulder, Colorado, and Pascal of Massy, France, created machines with hundreds of Qubits.
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Their roadmap for increasing the number of interacting qubits is the most aggressive in the industry. To create a computer that can start performing useful calculations, it will likely require tens of thousands of qubits, and work together to overcome the errors inherent in quantum systems.
Kera hampered research at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Both are located in Cambridge. In that system, physicists use laser light to trap an array of rubidium atoms and store quantum information at the energy levels of the electrons.
