The next ten years will be marked by all the uncertainties and unintended consequences that underpin so many doom and gloom scenarios.  It is time to start tracking the abundance and breakthroughs that will also come fast and furious in the next decade – equally as overwhelming, while also breathtaking, positive, highly technical and scientific – and transformative. Here are a couple of those recent “firsts.” 

In historic decision, FDA approves a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease

“Landmark decision heralds a new type of medicine that can tackle genetic conditions that are hard to treat” (1)

As reported last week by STAT:  The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)…approved the world’s first medicine based on CRISPR gene-editing technology, a groundbreaking treatment for sickle cell disease that delivers a potential cure for people born with the chronic and life-shortening blood disorder.  The new medicine, called Casgevy, is made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics. Its authorization is a scientific triumph for the technology that can efficiently and precisely repair DNA mutations — ushering in a new era of genetic medicines for inherited diseases.

The WSJ also covered this breakthrough:  FDA Approves World’s First Crispr Gene-Editing Drug for Sickle-Cell Disease

Researchers create first logical quantum processor

“Key step toward reliable, game-changing quantum computing”

Harvard researchers have realized a key milestone in the quest for stable, scalable quantum computing, an ultra-high-speed technology that will enable game-changing advances in a variety of fields, including medicine, science, and finance. The team, led by Mikhail Lukin, the Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor in physics and co-director of the Harvard Quantum Initiative, has created the first programmable, logical quantum processor, capable of encoding up to 48 logical qubits, and executing hundreds of logical gate operations, a vast improvement over prior efforts.

Published in Nature, the work was performed in collaboration with Markus Greiner, the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics; colleagues from MIT; and QuEra Computing, a Boston company founded on technology from Harvard labs. The system is the first demonstration of large-scale algorithm execution on an error-corrected quantum computer, heralding the advent of early fault-tolerant, or reliably uninterrupted, quantum computation. Lukin described the achievement as a possible inflection point akin to the early days in the field of artificial intelligence: the ideas of quantum error correction and fault tolerance, long theorized, are starting to bear fruit.

“I think this is one of the moments in which it is clear that something very special is coming,” Lukin said. “Although there are still challenges ahead, we expect that this new advance will greatly accelerate the progress toward large-scale, useful quantum computers.”  Denise Caldwell of the National Science Foundation agrees. “This breakthrough is a tour de force of quantum engineering and design,” said Caldwell, acting assistant director of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate, which supported the research through NSF’s Physics Frontiers Centers and Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes programs. “The team has not only accelerated the development of quantum information processing by using neutral atoms, but opened a new door to explorations of large-scale logical qubit devices, which could enable transformative benefits for science and society as a whole.”

The work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency through the Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices program; the Center for Ultracold Atoms, a National Science Foundation Physics Frontiers Center; the Army Research Office; the joint Quantum Institute/NIST;  and QuEra Computing.

Logical quantum processor based on reconfigurable atom arrays

Supplementary Video 1 is Atom video for coherent atom motions used in this work. These videos depict the coherent atom motions employed for the quantum circuits realized in these experiments. To perform parallel entangling gates, indicated by red ovals, the relevant pairs of atoms are brought within close vicinity ( ~ 2 μm). Supplementary Video 1: Fault-tolerant 4-qubit GHZ state using d = 3 color codes (Fig. 3). Ten color codes, arranged in two rows of five codes with 7 physical qubits per code, are encoded in parallel and the bottom row of five logical qubits are used as ancillas in the transversal CNOT and are then moved to the storage zone. The leftmost four computation logical qubits are then used to prepare a GHZ state.

Abstract

Suppressing errors is the central challenge for useful quantum computing (1), requiring quantum error correction (2,3,4,5,6) for large-scale processing. However, the overhead in the realization of error-corrected “logical” qubits, where information is encoded across many physical qubits for redundancy (2,3,4) poses significant challenges to large-scale logical quantum computing. Here we report the realization of a programmable quantum processor based on encoded logical qubits operating with up to 280 physical qubits. Utilizing logical-level control and a zoned architecture in reconfigurable neutral atom arrays (7), our system combines high two-qubit gate fidelities (8), arbitrary connectivity (7,9), as well as fully programmable single-qubit rotations and mid-circuit readout (10,11,12,13,14,15).

Operating this logical processor with various types of encodings, we demonstrate improvement of a two-qubit logic gate by scaling surface code6 distance from d = 3 to d = 7, preparation of color code qubits with break-even fidelities5, fault-tolerant creation of logical GHZ states and feedforward entanglement teleportation, as well as operation of 40 color code qubits. Finally, using three-dimensional [[8,3,2]] code blocks (16,17) we realize computationally complex sampling circuits (18) with up to 48 logical qubits entangled with hypercube connectivity (19) with 228 logical two-qubit gates and 48 logical CCZ gates (20). We find that this logical encoding substantially improves algorithmic performance with error detection, outperforming physical qubit fidelities at both cross-entropy benchmarking and quantum simulations of fast scrambling (21,22). These results herald the advent of early error-corrected quantum computation and chart a path toward large-scale logical processors.

Sources: 

[1] Preskill, J. Quantum Computing in the NISQ era and beyond. Quantum 2, 79 (2018).
[2] Shor, P. W. Fault-tolerant quantum computation. In Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science – Proceedings, 56–65 (IEEE, 1996).
[3] Steane, A. Multiple-particle interference and quantum error correction. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 452, 2551–2577 (1996).
[4] Dennis, E., Kitaev, A., Landahl, A. & Preskill, J. Topological quantum memory. Journal of Mathematical Physics 43, 4452–4505 (2002). arXiv:0110143 [quantph].
[5] Ryan-Anderson, C. et al. Implementing Fault-tolerant Entangling Gates on the Five-qubit Code and the Color Code (2022). arXiv:2208.01863.
[6] Quantum, G. Suppressing quantum errors by scaling a surface code logical qubit. Nature 614, 676–681 (2023).
[7] Bluvstein, D. et al. A quantum processor based on coherent transport of entangled atom arrays. Nature 604, 451–456 (2022).
[8] Evered, S. J. et al. High-fidelity parallel entangling gates on a neutral-atom quantum computer. Nature 622, 268–272 (2023).
[9] Beugnon, J. et al. Two-dimensional transport and transfer of a single atomic qubit in optical tweezers. Nature Physics 3, 696–699 (2007).
[10] Deist, E. et al. Mid-Circuit Cavity Measurement in a Neutral Atom Array. Physical Review Letters 129, 203602 (2022).
[11] Singh, K. et al. Mid-circuit correction of correlated phase errors using an array of spectator qubits. Science 380, 1265–1269 (2023).
[12] Graham, T. M. et al. Mid-circuit measurements on a neutral atom quantum processor (2023).
arXiv:2303.10051v2.
[13] Ma, S. et al. High-fidelity gates and mid-circuit erasure conversion in an atomic qubit. Nature 622, 279–284 (2023).
[14] Lis, J. W. et al. Mid-circuit operations using the omg-architecture in neutral atom arrays (2023). arXiv:2305.19266.
[15] Norcia, M. A. et al. Mid-circuit qubit measurement and rearrangement in a 171 Yb atomic array (2023). arXiv:2305.19119v3.
[16] Campbell, E. T. The smallest interesting colour code (2016). URL https://earltcampbell.com/2016/09/ 26/the-smallest-interesting-colour-code/.
[17] Vasmer, M. & Kubica, A. Morphing Quantum Codes. Physical Review Applied 10, 030319 (2022).
[18] Arute, F. et al. Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor. Nature 574, 505–510 (2019).
[19] Kuriyattil, S., Hashizume, T., Bentsen, G. & Daley, A. J. Onset of Scrambling as a Dynamical Transition in Tunable-Range Quantum Circuits. PRX Quantum 4, 030325 (2023).
[20] Bremner, M. J., Montanaro, A. & Shepherd, D. J. Average-Case Complexity Versus Approximate Simulation of Commuting Quantum Computations. Physical Review Letters 117, 080501 (2016).
[21] Daley, A. J., Pichler, H., Schachenmayer, J. & Zoller, P. Measuring Entanglement Growth in Quench Dynamics of Bosons in an Optical Lattice. Physical Review Letters 109, 020505 (2012).
[22] Huang, H. Y. et al. Quantum advantage in learning from experiments. Science 376, 1182–1186 (2022). arXiv:2112.00778.

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