Industrial giant Honeywell is bringing its quantum computing hardware to Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service. Although Microsoft has for a long time been developing its own quantum circuitry, the partnership with Honeywell offers the company access to Honeywell’s “trapped ion” technology, which uses atoms of ytterbium (Yb).
Trapped ions provide relatively long coherence times of the qubits created with them, in comparison to other qubit technologies. Perhaps as important, compared with other systems which have specific, locked locations for qubits, ions can be arbitrarily connected any qubit to any other qubit. More complex algorithms can be achieved with fewer computation steps compared with the locked architectures of other systems.
Honeywell has now a complete team of technologists, including atomic, molecular and optical physicists, scientists, engineers, and technicians who specialize in the design and development of trapped-ion quantum computers.
The company is not currently disclosing lot of details about its technology especially in terms of number of qubits but some researchers of the team has just posted an interesting paper on Arxiv.
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