D-Wave is a bit of an oddity in the quantum computing space, having been founded back in the last century. And its initial offering wasn't a quantum computer like those being developed by IBM or Google. Instead, the company built what's now called a quantum annealer, a machine that isn't general-purpose but can solve a large class of optimization problems. While the hardware shares some similarities with the qubits used in gate-based quantum computers, it operates in a fundamentally different way.

But a few years back, D-Wave started working on gate-based hardware, apparently choosing a somewhat unusual qubit technology called fluxonium. And this year, the company acquired a startup called Quantum Circuits that spun out of Yale University and has been developing what's called a dual-rail qubit (the same technology used by Amazon), which promises to make most errors very easy to detect, simplifying error correction.

On Wednesday, the company is publishing a paper in Nature that describes a key step in validating this dual-rail technology, showing that two of the qubits can be entangled without altering their best feature: Most are a single type that is easy to detect.

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© D-Wave

If you follow quantum computing news for long enough, it can start to seem like any quantum system that can alternate between two well-separated energy states can be used as a qubit. Atoms, ions, photons, electrons, and manufactured devices all have their backers. One of the key things that attracts backers is the tech's ability to scale. We'll need a lot of high-quality qubits to start doing any complex computations, and the ability of any technology to get us there is the subject of debate.

So even as some technologies can now support thousands of qubits, some competitors are still working on a small handful of qubits—the companies behind them are convinced that they have the potential to scale more effectively.

One of those technologies involves quantum dots that hold a single electron. Their advantage is that we can manufacture them using the same tech we use to build traditional processors, an approach that has proven to be scalable. This week saw two new papers describing different ways of using quantum dots, one of which was appealing enough that IBM bought the company that developed it. Separately, another company has released a processor showing 100 individual electrons being held in diamond defects, technology that wasn't obvious could scale.

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© HRL Laboratories

ISTA physicists have confirmed a theory proposed 20 years ago that could advance quantum technology. A future quantum computer may need separate modules to behave as one machine, even when they are physically apart. That requires distributed entanglement, a quantum connection between distant components that has typically depended on active control and repeated measurements. Physicists [...]

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