Quantum weeknotes 3

St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh

Music as well as quantum this week since the Festival is on. The banners in the Cathedral depict bellringing changes. Artist Edward Bruce, architect Nick O’Neill. There’s a peal of 12 bells. The Cathedral has lunchtime recitals every day for the next two weeks, and other music.

IBM on quantum advantage .. quantum + classical advantage https://www.nextplatform.com/2025/08/05/ibm-outlines-steps-to-verify-claims-of-quantum-advantage/

IBM and Pasqual paper .. framework for measuring quantum advantage https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20658 

IBM expects the first claims of quantum advantage will come from efforts in sampling problems, variational programs, and calculating the expectation values of observables. The challenge now will be to “rigorously confirm” when an advantage has occurred, the researchers wrote. Each part of the computation will have to be verified on their own merit through error detection and mitigation.

If this is the best that IBM can do to explain for what quantum computing should be used, compared to classical computing, there’s a lot of work to do yet.

Cisco quantum marketing https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2025/m07/at-cisco-bold-steps-towards-a-quantum-network.html 

 quantum entanglement source chip comes in. Pandey called it, “the first building block of a quantum network.” And Nejabati outlined its power and unique attributes.

“Our chip can generate up to 200 million pairs of entangled photons per second,” Nejabati said. “That’s a very high rate. We do it by injecting laser light into our chip, which converts every single photon to two lower-energy entangled photons. And since they are entangled at telco frequency, they can be transported easily. You don’t need a special transport catalyst, just a normal fiber can transfer your entangled photons.” .. entangled particles can transfer or share information, across any distance, via a phenomenon known as teleportation.

“The beauty of it is that photons or other particles could be separated physically, even by a large distance,”  “Entanglement actually allows us to transfer quantum information through the teleportation phenomenon.”

Marketing about UK quantum ecosystem and UK Quantum (Sussex) https://tech.eu/2025/07/31/uk-quantum-computing-is-going-universal-through-scaling 

Trapped ion “Their solution starts with the iQPU, or integrated Quantum Processing Unit—a proprietary trapped-ion chip designed from the ground up for manufacturability and performance. Each chip is fabricated on a standard 200mm commercial foundry line, a decision that makes industrial scaling feasible. The iQPU itself hosts hundreds of ion qubits on a die larger than 400mm², making it the most spacious chip of its kind in development.

Critically, the chip uses global microwave control rather than relying on traditional laser-based systems. This removed much of the optical complexity found in competing designs and simplifies the overall architecture.

To stitch multiple iQPUs together, UQ developed UQConnect, a proprietary interconnect system that links chips at a rate of 2,424 connections per second, with an ultra-high fidelity of 99.999993%.

Full stack,  €67 million contract from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) .. raised close to 100 million pounds.

Financing for quantum https://ff.co/quantum-computing/

New Town reflections

It’s just over a year since we moved to the New Town in Edinburgh. Time to collect some of the images from the year.

Reflecting the Georgian buildings in a large puddle next to the railings for Queen Street Gardens. 29 October 2023

North Edinburgh has many good walking paths, many of them converted from the railway network which used to connect Granton and Leith with the city. This is the Great Junction Street bridge over the Water of Leith. 9 November 2023

This is the new terminus for the tram service, which now runs from the airport to Newhaven. We often walk by one or other of the railway paths to Newhaven harbour, then along to the tram stop to return to town. 27 June 2023

Newhaven harbour, taken from the lighthouse. A few pleasure craft and small fishing boats moored; it’s also where the tenders from the big cruise ships come in. 13 April 2023

The Port of Leith takes much bigger ships. This is the Apache II, a pipe laying vessel. 7 January 2023

If you follow me on Blipfoto you will have seen these images before. It’s the most benign social media place, supported by membership fees, with no advertising. It’s possible to build a community of friends who are mutually interesting and supportive.

Views in Edinburgh

We moved again at the end of October 2022 much closer to the city centre. Daily notes have been going into Blipfoto.

Gathering some of those views

https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3045975706145130731

December 2022 From Corstorphine Hill, West of the city

https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3044159536643443636

November 2022 Looking towards Fife at Granton

https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3000306967081127692

November 2022 The Water of Leith, at the Shore in Leith

https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/3042711671236722909

July 2022 Shows three major bridges over the Forth Estuary; the railway bridge, the first road bridge, and the replacement, called the Queensferry Crossing (the one with three visible towers and the white cable)