The European Commission (EC) is concentrating efforts towards creating a solid network of support for the development of quantum technology in the member states. It all started in the autumn of 2018, with the launch of the Quantum Technologies Flagship, a 10-year initiative with a budget of €1 billion. In a report published recently, it is shown that, in the initial four-year ramp-up phase (until 2021), the EC invested €150 million to support 24 consortia involving leading research institutions and companies in this area. As part of this common effort, the European Innovation Council (EIC) also supports several projects focusing on quantum innovations. In this article we present you 3 projects from EIC Accelerator, Transition and Pathfinder, which are developing top of the line quantum technologies in Europe.
QuantrolOx: building machine learning software to optimise qubits
Reliance and stability can still be quite improved when it comes to quantum technologies’ implementation. For quantum computers to be useful they need to have 100s of thousands to physical qubits. Current control methods need frequent expert intervention, and the technology doesn’t scale. QuantrolOx decided to take on the challenge of turning quantum computing into a robust industry. The funded company is building automated machine learning based control software for quantum technologies to tune, stabilise, and optimise qubits.
QuantrolOx’s technology, that has received funding from the EIC Accelerator on project qx, presents a quantum autopilot software that continuously monitors and adjusts thousands of parameters to ensure smooth operation, accelerating development cycles and drastically increasing uptime. This frees up valuable quantum scientists to focus on more relevant work.
Recently, QuantrolOx raised a new seed round of €3.5 million led by VC Voima Ventures. About this achievement, we talked with Vishal Chatrath, company’s co-founder and CEO, who told us that:
This fund raise was necessary to give for us to hire an engineering team to deliver the first version of our product. We will launch the first version of our product on 29 August 2023 at SQA Conference, in Munich, Germany, and we’ll work with pilot customers to use our product and give us feedback.
Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech: making quantum computing market-ready
The technology market is not yet working in its full capacity to receive quantum computing, namely when it comes to hardware tools. To overcome this challenge, the EIC-funded Qilimanjaro offers full-stack quantum computing services to companies by providing hardware and software quantum computing services with a unique technological proposal. The core of their innovation is based in the development of analog quantum systems based on superconducting qubit technology with differentiated architectural elements: long coherence times, versatile quantum interactions between qubits, and high qubit connectivity.
To support their innovation, Qilimanjaro has received funding for the RoCCQeT project from the EIC Transition programme. The full-stack solution presented by the Spanish company aims to speed up quantum computing’s market readiness by using their quantum annealers to bypass roadblocks that limit quantum hardware.
Qilimanjaro is doing very well on the market, having closed a partnership with Repsol and ICOAxis and it will also install, together with GMV, at the BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) the first quantum computer in southern Europe. We had a chance of talking with Marta Estarellas, CEO of Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech, about these recent developments: “Our strategic collaboration with Repsol Ventures and ICO Axis has amplified our development capabilities, expanding our infrastructure, and nurturing a highly skilled team. This synergistic alliance allows us to effectively address the diverse requirements of our technology roadmap, ensuring that our innovations meet the real-world needs of large companies such as Repsol.". Marta continued:
Additionally, along with GMV we are leading the installation of the first quantum computer in Spain at (BSC) as part of the Quantum Spain project. The role of Qilimanjaro is to integrate all the required quantum enabling technologies with gate-based superconducting qubit chips exclusively from European providers and provide access to the quantum platform via our cloud software and programming framework based on Qibo (an open source platform for quantum programming, simulation, control and remote access). This ambitious project represents a major milestone for Spain, as it will witness the installation of the country's first quantum computer within the upcoming year.
FastGhost: ground-breaking quantum imaging system for the mid-IR region
The FastGhost project, funded by the EIC Pathfinder, is manipulating single photons and photon pairs to deliver a ground-breaking quantum imaging system for the mid-infrared (IR) region targeting the medical sciences. This project elaborates on the fact that quantum imaging using non-classically correlated photon pairs has been shown to possess a number of fundamental advantages with respect to known imaging modalities based on classical light.
The overarching goal of the FastGhost project is to move quantum imaging from a conceptually demonstrated experimental approach to a technology with viable benefits for medical applications. The Consortia, which already published 10 scientific articles, has been working to demonstrate the benefits of quantum imaging in a microscopy lab demonstrator on TRL 4.
To achieve the defined objectives, photon pair sources optimised for quantum imaging, single-photon detectors for the mid-IR, and highly resolving single-photon cameras will be developed in the project. The final demonstrator integrates all components and will represent a practically usable imaging device with performance parameters that are oriented for real-life application. We spoke with Valerio Flavio Gili, part of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF and coordinator of the project, about its recent developments: “We recently demonstrated quantum imaging with two approaches: wide-field and scanning. As for the wide-field approach we demonstrated Quantum Ghost Imaging in the near-infrared at 1400 nm in a compact setup without image preserving delay lines, with the spatial detection performed with a custom SPAD camera developed by our partners in FBK (https://doi.org/10.1364/AO.487084). As for the scanning approach, we demonstrated scanning quantum imaging at 1670 nm, outside the detection range of existing InGaAs technology, with commercially available superconducting nanowire detectors developed by SingleQuantum.” Valerio also added:
Our aim is to upgrade our setups and detections systems to achieve Quantum Ghost Imaging in real-time in the mid-infrared spectral region, to characterise meaningful samples with low light illumination, to avoid sample alteration.
DISCLAIMER: This information is provided in the interest of knowledge sharing and should not be interpreted as the official view of the European Commission, or any other organisation.