D-Wave shows off its new entry in quantum computing race

D-Wave is a bit of an oddity in the quantum computing space, having been founded back in the last century. And its initial offering wasn't a quantum computer like those being developed by IBM or Google. Instead, the company built what's now called a quantum annealer, a machine that isn't general-purpose but can solve a large class of optimization problems . While the hardware shares some similarities with the qubits used in gate-based quantum computers, it operates in a fundamentally different way. But a few years back, D-Wave started working on gate-based hardware, apparently choosing a somewhat unusual qubit technology called fluxonium . And this year, the company acquired a startup called Quantum Circuits that spun out of Yale University and has been developing what's called a dual-rail qubit (the same technology used by Amazon ), which promises to make most errors very easy to detect, simplifying error correction. On Wednesday, the company is publishing a paper in Nature that describes a key step in validating this dual-rail technology, showing that two of the qubits can be entangled without altering their best feature: Most are a single type that is easy to detect. Read full article Comments