Quantum computing named one of the hottest 10 fields in science

The Financial Times has named quantum computing one of the 10 hottest fields in science in a recent article.

Paper: Verification of Quantum Programs

I'm of the opinion that formal verification of programs has a limited set of applications, in large part due to the "good enough" software principle. Nonetheless, it is nice to see work in the quantum programming area. Here's a just posted paper on arXiv: Verification of Quantum Programs by Ying, Yu, Feng, and Duan.

QIS-XML: An Extensible Markup Language for Quantum Information Science

By Pascal Heus out of George Mason University: QIS-XML: An Extensible Markup Language for Quantum Information Science.

Cooling through computation

Erasing data generates heat. For example, an And gate can erase data because if you get a false (0) you don't know if the inputs were both false or if just one of them were 0. Hence quantum computers need to perform reversible operations. Here is some pretty cool work on cooling computers by the computations they perform.

D-Wave sells quantum computer to Lockheed Martin

For those who have not seen it yet, D-Wave has sold its first quantum computer to Lockheed Martin for 10 million. Here are a few of the many articles about it:

• Discover Magazine
• International Business Times
  

Verdal on the cover of the new Scientific American

Vlatko Verdal, of [1] fame, wrote an article titled "Living in a Quantum World", which made the cover of this month's (June 2011) cover of Scientific American.

References
[1] Vedral, Vlatko. Introduction to Quantum Information Science. 1 ed. Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 2006.

More D-Wave Claims

For those who have not seen it yet, D-Wave is making some new claims. I've been skeptical since 2007, and still feel the same way. I think Scott Aaronson described the situation well in his blog, as he usually does about D-Wave.