A British quantum start-up firm has been awarded one of the largest government quantum-computing contracts ever given to a single company. Universal Quantum has won the €67m contract from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to build fully scalable quantum computers based on trapped-ion technology.
Day:18 November 2022
Physics World: Report calls on the UK to show ambition in the development of quantum technologies
The UK government must be bold and ambitious to position the country as a world leader in the global quantum technologies market. So says a new report released last month by the Institute of Physics (IOP), which also calls for quantum start-up firms in the UK to be supported to allow research institutes to spin out quantum businesses more easily.
Physics World: Double dose of quantum weirdness pushes sensors past the limit
For most people, quantum mechanics seems pretty weird. Take the principle of delocalization, which states that a quantum particle can, in some sense, exist simultaneously in multiple locations. Then there’s entanglement: the invisible connection between particles that allows the state of one particle to determine that of another, even across vast distances. But as weird as delocalization and entanglement are, they can be very useful, and physicists at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, US have now incorporated both into a single quantum sensor for the first time. The new sensor can detect accelerations below the usual limit set by noise arising from quantum fluctuations, providing a sharper tool for exploring fundamental physics as well as for applications such as navigation and Earth monitoring.