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… for some reason wordpress is having trouble with my pdf posts recently. With apologies to the gods of platform independence and download bandwidth here are my slides in ppt format: SC07 powerpoint slides .

You can also get to them by clicking on the following image:

D-Wave Senior Scientist and condensed matter physicist par excellence Mohammad Amin gave a talk at MIT yesterday. The abstract:

Adiabatic Quantum Computation with Noisy Qubits

Adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) is an attractive model of quantum computation as it may naturally possess some degree of fault tolerance. Nonetheless, any practical quantum circuit is noisy and one must answer important questions regarding what level of noise can be tolerated. Gate model quantum computation relies on three important quantum resources: superposition, entanglement, and phase coherence. In this presentation, I will discuss the role of these three resources and the effect of environment upon them with respect to AQC. I will also show a close relation between open AQC and incoherent tunneling processes as in a double-well potential. At a more microscopic level, I will present a non-Markovian theory for macroscopic resonant tunneling, together with recent experimental results on superconducting flux qubits which demonstrate excellent agreement with the theory and may shed light on the microscopic origin of flux noise in these devices. Finally, I will discuss the effect of low and high frequency noise on practical AQC processors and compare AQC with thermal annealing.

Here are the slides!

This is what a 28-qubit superconducting AQC looks like. In case you’re wondering, “unholey” refers to the types of transformers between qubits and couplers (no holes in groundplane), “CJC” means this chip used D-Wave compound Josephson junction couplers, and “Leda” is the mask name for this generation. We name our masks alphabetically using moons, so Leda is the 12th generation since we starting design/fab/test of superconducting AQCs. The demo in February was from the Europa mask.

Shortly I will be posting details of our demo at SC07 next week. As a teaser here is the mail-out we’re using. The application we’re demo-ing is an image matching application co-developed with Dr. Hartmut Neven of Google, a world-leading authority on image matching algorithms. The hardware we are using to run the application is a 28-qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer.