Electron Spin

They're working on manipulating electron spin at the University of Southampton. Notable, because they could be used in physical implementation of quantum computers.

Position-Based Quantum Cryptography

Here's an interesting paper: Position-Based Quantum Cryptography by Nishanth Chandran, Serge Fehr, Ran Gelles, Vipul Goyal, and Rafail Ostrovsky.You can get the paper here on arXiv and there is a good popular science summary here on Technology Review. Quantum cryptography has some great applications, adding in location makes it even more so.

Quantum Key Distribution: 1 megabit/sec, 50 km

At Toshiba they've done quantum key distribution at 1 megabit a second over 50 km.

Quantum heuristic algorithm for traveling salesman problem

I came across this paper on arXiv: Quantum heuristic algorithm for traveling salesman problem by Jeongho Bang, Seokwon Yoo, James Lim, Junghee Ryu, Changhyoup Lee, and Jinhyoung Lee. Here's the abstract:

We propose a quantum heuristic algorithm to solve a traveling salesman problem by generalizing Grover search. Sufficient conditions are derived to greatly enhance the probability of finding the tours with extremal costs, reaching almost to unity and they are shown characterized by statistical properties of tour costs. In particular for a Gaussian distribution of the tours along the cost we show that the quantum algorithm exhibits the quadratic speedup of its classical counterpart, similarly to Grover search.

The paper is a short read at 5 pages too. I remember discussing the traveling salesman problem in the Summer of 2007 when discussing graph theory in a survey course at Colorado Tech with Dr. Willshire, Dr. Sanden, and Dr. Calongne. It wasn't all that long after I started getting into quantum computing as my research there. I remember at the time thinking it just seemed like a problem that a quantum computer could somehow be utilized for.

US Army and NSA Supporting Quantum Computing

Not too surprisingly, the US Army and NSA are looking for quantum computing proposals. There are 3 areas they're looking for, and they focus on physical implementations. Unfortunately quantum software isn't covered. As we've seen with classical computers, the physical implementation isn't much use without well written software.

Another Physical Advancement by NIST

NIST has created a quantum dimmer switch, another step forward towards physical implementations of quantum computers. (NIST announcement)

True Randomness via Quantum Mechanics

Not too surprisingly to those in the quantum computing field: at the University of Maryland they're utilizing quantum mechanics for true randomness. Randomness plays a key role in cryptography. If you've ever wondered why you might have to randomly hit the keyboard for awhile when generating a key, that's why- random input is trying to be gathered.