Nature - Michael Brooks – While some are debating about quantum supremacy, others are trying to find out how to put small imperfect devices to work for solving real-world problem. A good overview of the quantum algorithm landscape.

Science Advances - P. Kwiat (U. of Illinois), F. Kaneda (Tohoku U.) – Reliable single photon sources are extremely important for quantum communication, but hard to make. Using time multiplexing Kwiat's team managed to increase the efficiency of the process to the point where they could get several thousands of 12-photon events per second.

M Mosca and M Piani (EvolutionQ) – Research report published by the Global Risk Institute, trying to assess the quantum threat over classic cryptosystems. About 50% of the experts think that quantum computers will be threat for the current cryptosystems within 15 years.

Optics & Photonics - IQOQI (Innsbruck) – Report on a 20-qubit trapped ions experiment and the difficulty to know if a quantum device is behaving properly. Using a brute force approach would be equivalent to simulate the evolution of the quantum systems classically: fairly inefficient. By using the right (cryptographic) setting and tools, you can manage to do this much more efficiently.

IBM Research Zurich - Vadim Lyubashevsky – Quantum algorithms are moving the world! The impact of algorithms not yet implemented shook the crypto community when the NIST asked in 2016 for new quantum-safe crytosystems to be proposed for a public release in 2024. IBM is reporting on their proposal called CRYSTALS that should be implemented in its cloud solutions by 2020.

U. of Twente - W.r. Van Der Veen – Cryptography can make use of physically uncloneable functions for authentication and encryption. Here is a brief account about what this is and how it is done. Although there is a lot of quantum in there, the function (key in the article) is still classical. Quantum people have devised quantum attacks on such devices and also quantum PUF.

Science DOI: 10.1126/science.aay2645 - Centre for Quantum Computation & Communication Technology, Nicolas Menicucci - U Tokyo - U New Mexico – The University of Melbourne CQC2T is reporting the creation of a large photonic cluster state. Cluster states are resources that can be used for implementing measurement based quantum computations. The nice thing is all the complicated stuff is made at the begining through the creation of this horribly entangled state. Using it is then much simpler as it requires only single qubit measurements and classically single qubit gates. This is quite an achievement and very motivating to see that fundamentally different architectures are subject of research.

Science DOI: 10.1126/science.aay4354 - BigQ (Denmark), Ulrik Lund Andersen – The Danes have done the same as the Aussies. Or is it the other way around. Impressive anyways: we are talking of 30 000 entangled light pulses.

Barclays, IBM – Looks like they have found a use for small scale quantum computer. Need to read the original paper though.

Toshiba – Interesting to see industries picking up the subject.

Rahko, Balderton Capital – Interesting to see a Series A VC fund invest in a seed round. VC's are probably seeing the quantum ecosystem as sufficiently small and the prospects with large corporations sufficiently interesting to make such unusual move.

IonQ - Samsung Catalyst Fund and Mubadala Capital – $55m raised in this round, $77m total. That's serious money now.

Nu Quantum, Amadeus Capital Partners, with participation from IQ Capital, Ahren Capital, Cambridge Enterprise and Martlet Capital – 650k pounds raised in a seed round for building single photon sources and detectors, which are the building blocks of quantum networks.

U Strathclyde - Msquared – A U Strathclyde + Msquared partnership secured funding worth a total of £4.6 million.

HQS Quantum Simulations – Designing software for quantum computer assisted material designs.

Xanadu

LANL - Cristina Cirstoiu, Zoe Holmes, Joseph Iosue, Lukasz Cincio, Patrick J. Coles, Andrew Sornborger – A new technique for simulating the evolution of quantum physical systems with noisy intermediate scale quantum computers that allows to go beyond the decoherence time of the quantum machines. Very cool!

LANL - Lukasz Cincio, Yiğit Subaş, Andrew T Sornborger and Patrick J Coles – Same group of people from Los Alamos. This one would help finding new circuits and serve as a guide for compiling high-level functions into device specific sequences of commands. Very promising (has led already to many follow-ups by the same group. Wondering how it can be adapted to make it work for optimizing communication protocols.

ITRC of Quantum Computing for AI, KAIST Korea - Daniel K. Park, Francesco Petruccione & June-Koo Kevin Rhee – Using quantum algorithms for solving real-world problems requires making classical data available to it. This paper describes a possible architecture for loading classical data into a quantum memory in an efficient way.

IQC – Theory.

IRIF – Quantum machine learning, optimization, quantum communications and cryptography.

Rigetti

Forbes – US views on the investments by China into quantum technology.

La Tribune – more or less accurate description of the french ecosystem.

Nature doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-02935-4 – 2017 and 2018 have seen 52 companies funded for $450m fresh money.

PhysicsWorld – Tries to explain why VCs invest in quantum software companies.