Well-heeled Google spinout SandboxAQ announced its first acquisition today – snapping up cybersecurity software specialist Cryptosense – while quantum networking startup Aliro Quantum added a CMO to ramp up commercial activities. Elsewhere, a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and two National Science Foundation Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes issued a paper detailing error correction progress for neutral cold atom based qubits.

The acquisition was not unexpected. In August, SandboxAQ announced its Strategic Investment Program citing an investment in a Canadian cybersecurity company, evolutionQ. “[O]ur first investment: evolutionQ, a Canadian quantum cybersecurity company specializing in Quantum Key Distribution. QKD will play a key role in creating a secure, quantum-safe digital infrastructure, and complements our own efforts in the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) space. We were happy to participate in its recent $5.5 million Series A round of funding.”

The purchase of Paris-based Cryptosense had been in the works as SandboxAQ looks for investment opportunities. SandboxAQ reported, “The acquisition of Cryptosense complements and accelerates the deployment of SandboxAQ’s Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) solutions to corporations and government institutions worldwide. SandboxAQ’s cybersecurity products enable large enterprises to scale cryptography management across their IT infrastructure, providing CISOs with a single, 360° view of how encryption is used throughout the enterprise – a critical first step in migrating to PQC.”

Cryptosense bills itself as a “cryptography lifecycle management” company products “allow an organization to control the way that cryptography is used to protect sensitive data throughout their applications and infrastructure. It enables accurate risk assessment for threats, simplifies compliance and allows enterprise-wide enforcement of cryptography policy.”

Aliro Expands Commercialization Team

Founded in 2019 by Harvard professor Prineha Narang, Aliro Quantum describes itself as “designing software used to design, architect, simulate, and build quantum networks.” Many believe quantum networking will have many uses, not least enabling technology the scaling up of quantum computers by connecting QPUs and quantum sub-systems to achieve be a critical size.

The appointment of Michael Wood as its first chief marketing officer is part of the Aliro’s efforts to ramp up commercial activities. Aliro reported that, “Over the past 12 months, the company has continued to expand engagements with systems integrators, telecom providers, major government agencies, and academic and industry partners to design, architect, simulate, and build quantum networks. Wood will lead Aliro’s global marketing initiatives and will be responsible for messaging, positioning, growth marketing, demand generation, analyst, and media relations.”

Here’s Woods’ bio from the press release: “Wood joins Aliro from Versa Networks where he built and led the marketing organization. He has also held senior leadership positions at VMware, VeloCloud Networks, Akamai and Cisco. Wood joins recent appointee, Michael Gaffney, Aliro’s head of public sector, on the company’s senior management team. Gaffney recently opened Aliro’s Washington D.C. presence to support the company’s expanding government and public sector initiatives following a career in Army intelligence and years implementing cloud and security solutions for the government.”

Aliro CEO and Chairman Jim Ricotta, said, “Aliro is on a mission to build the quantum internet, and we have had remarkable success developing the foundational technologies needed for quantum networks, working with a number of organizations to simulate and build their next generation of networks. Michael Wood has had repeated success creating and growing new businesses and markets, and his expertise will help us continue to build momentum.”

More Momentum for Neutral Atom Qubits

Error mitigation and correction remain huge challenges in quantum computing. One of the variables in tackling this problem is the many different kinds of qubit technologies under development (superconducting, trapped ion, neutral atoms, photonics, etc.). Recent work by the University of Wisconsin and NSF suggests use of neutral atom-based qubits may permit a novel approach to effective error mitigation.

There’s a good account of the work posted on UW Madison website, “In a theory paper published in Nature Communications, UW–Madison physicist Shimon Kolkowitz and colleagues show a new way that quantum errors could be identified in one type of qubit known as neutral atoms. By pinpointing which qubit experienced an error, the study suggests that the requirements on quantum error correction can be significantly relaxed, approaching a level that neutral atom quantum computers have already achieved.”

The work is actually a collaboration between UW-Madison and two National Science Foundation Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes, Hybrid Quantum Architectures and Networks (HQAN) and Robust Quantum Simulation (RQS). Kolkowitz is quoted in the article, “In quantum computing, a lot of the overhead in an error-correcting code is figuring out which qubit had the error. If I know which qubit it is, then the amount of redundancy needed for the code is reduced. Neutral atom qubits are right on the edge of what you would call this fault-tolerant threshold, but no one has been able to fully realize it yet.”

As always, these studies are best read directly. These excerpts from the paper’s abstract do a good job summarizing:

• “First, we present a physical model of qubits encoded in a particular atomic species, 171Yb, that enables erasure conversion without additional gates or ancilla qubits. By encoding qubits in the hyperfine states of a metastable electronic level, the vast majority of errors (i.e., decays from the Rydberg state that is used to implement two-qubit gates) result in transitions out of the computational subspace into levels whose population can be continuously monitored using cycling transitions that do not disturb the qubit levels…As a result, the location of these errors is revealed, converting them into erasures. We estimate a fraction Re = 0.98 of all errors can be detected this way.
• “Second, we quantify the benefit of erasure conversion at the circuit level, using simulations of the surface code. We find that the predicted level of erasure conversion results in a significantly higher threshold, pth = 4.15%, compared to the case of pure depolarizing errors (pth = 0.937%). Finally, we find a faster reduction in the logical error rate immediately below the threshold.” (Figure from paper below)

In their conclusion, the authors say their approach is “promising for demonstrating fault-tolerant logical operations with near-term experimental hardware.” They also anticipate that the proposed erasure conversion technique “will also be applicable to other codes and other physical qubit platforms.”

Link to Aliro announcement: https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/aliro-quantum-names-michael-wood-as-cmo/

Link to UM-Wisconsin article: https://www.physics.wisc.edu/2022/09/12/nsf-quantum-center-collaboration-finds-path-to-fault-tolerance-in-neutral-atom-qubits/

Link to UM-Wisconsin article paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32094-6