Single-Qubit Fidelity Assessment of Quantum Annealing Hardware

As a wide variety of quantum computing platforms become available, methods for assessing and comparing the performance of these devices are of increasing interest and importance. Inspired by the success of single-qubit error rate computations for tracking the progress of gate-based quantum computers, this work proposes a quantum annealing single-qubit assessment (QASA) protocol for quantifying […]

Enhanced Uplink Quantum Communication With Satellites via Downlink Channels

In developing the global quantum Internet, quantum communication with low-earth-orbit satellites will play a pivotal role. Such communication will need to be two way: effective not only in the satellite-to-ground (downlink) channel but also in the ground-to-satellite channel (uplink). Given that losses on this latter channel are significantly larger relative to the former, techniques that […]

Benchmarking Quantum Coprocessors in an Application-Centric, Hardware-Agnostic, and Scalable Way

Existing protocols for benchmarking current quantum coprocessors fail to meet the usual standards for assessing the performance of high-performance-computing platforms. After a synthetic review of these protocols—whether at the gate, circuit, or application level—we introduce a new benchmark, dubbed Atos Q-score, which is application-centric, hardware-agnostic, and scalable to quantum advantage processor sizes and beyond. The […]

Quantum Approximate Optimization With Parallelizable Gates

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) has been introduced as a heuristic digital quantum computing scheme to find approximate solutions of combinatorial optimization problems. We present a scheme to parallelize this approach for arbitrary all-to-all connected problem graphs in a layout of quantum bits (qubits) with nearest-neighbor interactions. The protocol consists of single qubit operations […]

Entanglement Distribution in a Quantum Network: A Multicommodity Flow-Based Approach

We consider the problem of optimizing the achievable EPR-pair distribution rate between multiple source-destination pairs in a quantum Internet, where the repeaters may perform a probabilistic Bell-state measurement and we may impose a minimum end-to-end fidelity as a requirement. We construct an efficient linear programming (LP) formulation that computes the maximum total achievable entanglement distribution […]

High-Dimensional Semiquantum Cryptography

A semiquantum key distribution (SQKD) protocol allows two users, one of whom is restricted in their quantum capabilities to being nearly classical, to establish a shared secret key, secure against an all-powerful adversary. The study of such protocols helps to answer the fundamental question of “how quantum” must a protocol be to gain an advantage […]