Ping An Insurance, a Chinese holding conglomerate, has joined forces with Origin Quantum, a start-up, to develop financial algorithms and hardware that could help fight financial fraud. Within the framework of this partnership, a fraud detection model was developed based on quantum neural network technology. The model is said to be able to identify abnormal transfers and transactions and effectively identify complex money laundering transactions.
In a similar development, the Bank of China, China Merchants Bank, and the Bank of Communications are working with TuringQ, a quantum computing firm, to enable the use of quantum artificial intelligence algorithms in banking, in areas such as credit card fraud detection and investment portfolios optimisation.
China has become the third country – after Canada and the USA – where a company has developed a complete computer system using quantum technology for commercial use, according to South China Morning Post. Developed by the Origin Quantum startup, the 24-qubit quantum computer named Wuyuan is based on superconducting chip technology and is said to have been delivered to an unknown user more than a year ago. While not China’s first quantum computer, Wuyuan is considered to be the first such computer built for commercial purposes in the country.
The US Air Force awarded SandboxAQ a small business innovation research (SBIR) contract to research quantum navigation technologies. SandboxAQ will advance research and development for its quantum navigation system, designed to complement the Global Positioning System (GPS) for accurate navigation in environments where the loss of precision GPS may negatively impact operations. The company’s quantum sensor prototype is to be optimised in coordination with the Air Force.
A team of researchers from the Institute of Solid State Physics at the University of Tokyo in Japan, Johns Hopkins University in the United States, and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany has discovered a quantum state where water remains liquid even at extremely low temperatures. The team found that the alignment of atoms – one of their central property – did not ‘freeze’, as it would typically happen, but remained in a ‘liquid’ state.
The researchers intended to create a quantum state in which the atomic alignment that is associated with the spins did not order, even at very low temperatures. To achieve this state, they used a special material – a compound of the elements, praseodymium, zirconium, and oxygen.
The new quantum material could serve as a model system to develop new quantum sensors that are highly sensitive.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Delft University of Technology, and the University of New South Wales have developed ‘wiggle wells’ to improve the accuracy of quantum computers. The researchers showed that tweaking a qubit`s physical structure, known as a silicon quantum dot, creates sufficient valley splitting to reduce computing errors.
French bank Crédit Agricole announced that it had conducted two successful experiments for derivatives and credit calculations using quantum computing. The bank partnered with French quantum computer manufacturer Pasqal and Spanish firm Multiverse Computing (which works on quantum and quantum-inspired algorithms).
The two experiments, which started in 2021, focused on evaluating the contribution of an algorithmic approach inspired by quantum computing in two areas: the valuation of financial products and the assessment of credit risks. The bank found that quantum neural networks can be beneficial to these types of calculations, but that the technology is too resource-intensive and involves long processing times. However, the technology can be used to optimise speed and memory is specific algorithmic techniques are applied.
The US Department of Energy (DOE) announced it is allocating US$9.1 million to 13 projects dedicated to advancing research in quantum information science (QIS) with relevance to nuclear physics. The projects selected for funding cover the development of next-generation materials and architectures for superconducting qubits, solid state quantum simulators, and quantum optomechanical sensors for improving measurements of optical decay, and other areas.
An international team of scientists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Linz, and the University of Sheffield has announced a breakthrough in retaining the quantum coherence of quantum dot spin qubits.
A major challenge in quantum computing is to find a spin-photon interface that is both good at storing quantum information and efficient at converting it into light. The team found out that ‘in a device constructed with semiconductor materials that have the same lattice parameter, the nuclei “felt” the same environment and behaved in unison. As a result, it is now possible to filter out this nuclear noise and achieve a near two-order magnitude improvement in storage time.’
This new method could allow for improvements in information security, the search for novel materials and chemicals, and the measurements of fundamental physical processes requiring exact temporal synchronisation among sensors.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has published a patent insight report on quantum computing. The report provides an overview of quantum computing at large, while also looking at issues such as physical realisations of quantum computing, quantum error correction and mitigation, and technologies related to quantum computing and artificial intelligence/machine learning.
One of the report’s key findings is that the number of inventions in the field of quantum computing has multiplied over the last decade. In addition, quantum computing inventions show a higher growth rate than in all fields of technology in general. The above-average share of international patent applications in quantum computing suggests high economic expectations related to the technology.
Japanese ICT company Fujitsu announced that it had conducted successful trials to evaluate the widely-used RSA encryption for possible vulnerability to code-cracking by quantum computers. Fujitsu conducted the trials in January 2023 using its 39 qubit quantum simulator to assess how difficult it would be for quantum computers to crack existing RSA cryptography. Fujitsu researchers discovered that a fault-tolerant quantum computer with a scale of approximately 10,000 qubits and 2.23 trillion quantum gates would be required to crack RSA, which is much higher than current quantum computing capacities.
