News and updates

Computational innovation has moved far beyond developing the next killer app. The new frontiers of information technology are in artificial intelligence, blockchain and quantum computation.

Australia's first quantum technology start-up completes initial seed round. Three global technology funding giants have invested in Q-CTRL, Australia’s first venture-capital-backed quantum technology company, established by the University of Sydney’s Professor Michael Biercuk.

The journey to realizing functional quantum computers will be long and it's a path that Q-CTRL is committed to making as easy as possible for you.

We know that quantum bits - the heart of quantum technology - are tricky beasts. They are sensitive, easily knocked out of their quantum state due to interference from the environment. 'Noise', as this is called, is something they do not deal well with. Things get even more sensitive when we consider maintaining 'entanglement' between qubits as well.

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 Control superseded stability.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.