There’s not been much public blogging lately because I’ve been posting the quantum notes in private, for the project which I’m supporting to spinout from Heriot Watt university.
There’s a different big infrastructure project going on, and we have a way to get pictures of some of the components that it takes to build.
The heavy semi-sub Xiang Tai Kou
We’d watched the Xiang Tai Kou backing in to the deep water dock at Leith on the evening of 11 October 2025, trying to see from 2 miles up town (with binoculars) what she was carrying. Eight huge cylinders .. monoplies for the Inch Cape windfarm. For scale, the Targe Guillemot holding position in front of it is 25m long. The big ship is 231m long and 46m wide.
This was the first arrival of a procession of these Chinese flagged heavy deck cargo vessels, last port Suez. It was preceeded by months of dredging, in the channels on the Forth as well as in the entry to the main Leith dock behind the lock.
The dredger Magnor, February 2025
Th operation also had at least three tugs involved, the GPS Avenger, Union Onyx and Union Topaz, moving and shepherding the big hulls being used for the material dredged up.
Sheng Chang 777 on the 23rd October 2025
The next ship in was the Sheng Chang; this image has people underneath the monopiles.
Wei Xiao Tian Shi on the 31st October 2025
This was the third ship in; there were 8 bogies with 10 axles each underneath the cylinders.
Heavy lift vessel Les Alizés, 23 December 2025
This is the start of the next stage, where the heavy lift vessel loaded on 4 or 5 of the monopiles and went off to set them in place at the windfarm, which is more or less due East of Dundee.
Inch Cape wind farm is offshore Montrose, connected to Cockenzie by subsea cable. The lift ship, made in China, is owned by a Belgian company, Jan de Nul, headquartered in Luxembourg.
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 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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)
Cunning Systems 