News and updates

The Black Opal suite is coming to the public soon and we wanted to share a bit of insight about the architectural approach we've taken in designing our products.

This blog has looked at some of the great technical work being done by our quantum control engineers led by Dr Michael Hush. We've seen how their team has taken experimental insights developed over the past decade and built them into powerful computational tools for the efficient characterization and suppression of noise and errors in quantum hardware.

How are we going to scale-up quantum computing so that it can do something useful? Right now this question is driving research and engineering teams across the world. Their focus is overwhelmingly on hardware: designing qubits with lower error rates.

Two-qubit gates are really the top pain point for most teams working in quantum computing. Right now they dominate error rates in quantum hardware but there has been little progress in understanding pathways to improve performance.

Central to all Q-CTRL solutions is the idea that being able to control your quantum system is more important than its apparent "inherent" stability in isolation. This is the same concept which the Wright Brothers used to build the modern aviation industry. Control superseded stability.

Small start-ups like ours rely on brilliant hires. Few come more brilliant than Claire Edmunds, one of our Quantum Control Engineers. Claire can often be found in the lab or in one of our quiet rooms staring at walls of algebra written across whiteboards and glass, looking for a stray negative sign ... 'I find it very therapeutic,' Claire said.

When conducting a criminal investigation, discovering a fingerprint can help identify the culprit. Q-CTRL is creating tools to help manufacturers of quantum computers identify the sources of interference or noise that limit the performance of their qubits, the building blocks of quantum machines.

The global quantum community is a growing scientific space. Increasingly it is becoming a vibrant business community. Q-CTRL is happy to be one of the first quantum start-ups and as our technological capacity develops, so to does the broader community.

At Q-CTRL we've had a great week. Our collaboration with IBM was announced last Thursday at the inaugural IBM Q Summit Silicon Valley in Menlo Park, California.

Q-CTRL is today joining the IBM Q Network, a global community of corporations and startups with access to IBM's commercial quantum computing systems.

Noise is everywhere. Planes in the air, neighbors blaring music and kids playing in the backyard. It is impossible to get any work done when it's too noisy. The same goes for quantum computers.

Welcome to the first Q-CTRL newsletter, a regular missive where we'll be covering what's new and exciting in quantum tech. We'll let you look under the hood at Q-CTRL and fill you in on what's new in the fastest-growing tech sector.