The Israeli Innovation Authority and the Defense Ministry announced last month that they will invest around NIS 200 million ($62 million) in the development of a state quantum computer, laying the groundwork for Israeli computational capability in the field.
According to Prof. Roee Ozeri of the Weizmann Institute of Science, an expert in quantum computing research in the Department of Physics of Complex Systems, an Israeli team of researchers has developed the country’s first quantum computer, a momentous achievement that has taken years to achieve.
In a phone conversation with The Times of Israel on Tuesday, Ozeri said he and a group of PhD students at his university lab have been working on the various components of the computer for several years and have spent the last two to three years putting it together.
The gadget is one of roughly 30 quantum computers in various stages of development around the world, and one of less than ten that employ ion traps, a cutting-edge technique that confines ions (molecules with a net electrical charge) in a confined space using magnetic or/and electric fields. Quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental unit of quantum information, can be made from trapped ions.
“There was a lot of time invested in the know-how and in putting together the building blocks for the quantum computer,” he said. The project was led by Dr. Tom Manovitz, a quantum computing researcher, and research student Yotam Shapira, and was published Tuesday in PRX Quantum, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Physical Society (APS).
Quantum computers can retain qubits in “superposition,” a quantum physics principle in which they are both at the same time, whereas traditional computers carry out logical operations based on one of two locations — 1 or 0, on or off, up or down. According to an MIT Technology Review explanation, quantum computers in this mode “can crunch through a large number of conceivable outcomes concurrently.”
The Weizmann computer has five qubits, which is about the same as IBM’s version when it initially started selling quantum computing as a cloud service last year.
The researchers will now utilise the quantum computer to execute advanced algorithms while they work on a larger machine that can handle larger data loads, according to Ozeri. He expects the larger quantum computer, known as WeizQC, will take at least another year to complete.
WeizQC is a reference to WEIZAC, the name of one of the world’s earliest computers constructed in Israel at the Weizmann Institute in the 1950s, “when all Israel had was marshes and camels,” according to a statement released by the institution.
WeizQC is expected to work with 64 qubits and “demonstrate the quantum advantage, which until now has only been achieved by computers built in two labs: at Google and at the University of Science and Technology of China,” the university noted.
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