ColdQuanta has been selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a scalable, cold-atom-based quantum computing hardware and software platform that can demonstrate quantum advantage on real-world problems. The award is valued at up to $7.4M.
The DARPA award is part of the ONISQ program—Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices—aimed at developing quantum systems that can scale to hundreds or thousands of qubits with high performance and reliability. The objective is to show quantum advantage of quantum-hybrid systems over classical systems for a range of difficult combinatorial optimization problems including resource allocation, logistics, and image recognition. ColdQuanta’s Quantum Core™ technology uses lasers to cool atoms to near absolute zero and can use individual atoms as qubits in a scalable manner, all without the need for cryogenic refrigeration.
ColdQuanta’s partners in this collaboration are the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Raytheon Technologies, Argonne National Laboratory, University of Chicago, NIST Gaithersburg, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Innsbruck, and Tufts University. (BusinessWire)