Alexandra De Castro

Quandela • November 28 2024

The sound of photons: Interview with quantum composer and Quandela cloud user Eduardo Miranda  - Quandela

We all know that quantum computing is rapidly emerging as part of the next generation of high-performance computing to help solve industrial and societal most pressing problems. However, only a few people know that this promising super tool can also be regarded as a musical instrument.  


Professor and composer Eduardo Miranda, from the University of Plymouth in the UK, has been mastering the “sound of the qubits” to create music using Quandela’s photonic QPU Altair on the Cloud. Some of his p...

Quandela • November 18 2024

Correcting errors with an efficient use of qubits  - Quandela

Quandela’s innovative photonic architecture brings us to fault-tolerant quantum computing closer than ever 


Fault tolerance represents a critical milestone in quantum computing. No matter the architecture you explore, current quantum computers are noisy, and one of the most challenging goals of quantum technologies involves performing reliable and useful tasks despite the noise affecting them.  


During the last decades, engineers have developed a range of quantum error-correcting codes. Th...

Quandela • September 26 2024

Photon recycling, a novel method that improves quantum information - Quandela

Photons, the tiny particles of light, are the natural carriers of information. Whatever architecture we choose to create a quantum computer, there is no escape: photons must be involved sooner or later. As photons journey through optical fibers and other optical components, each photon carries a risk of getting absorbed by the material it encounters.  


Photon loss represents a significant problem in information technologies, particularly in fields such as fiber optics, quantum computing, and...

PASQAL • March 14 2024

Testing Cryptographic Codes Using Adiabatic Quantum Methods Experimentally

Written by Alexandra de Castro‍Have you ever wondered how your bank protects your personal and financial information from cybercriminals? They use end-to-end (in this case bank-to-customer) cryptographic techniques, ensuring privacy and confidentiality, keeping your data from being stolen or altered.In the digital era, when your smart phone is your shopping device, credit card, personal and workplace messaging, cryptography is an essential cybersecurity tool. But how does cryptography work? A wi...

PASQAL • December 15 2023

Tackling Graph-based Problems Combining PASQAL Quantum Technology with NVIDIA GPUs

Written by Alexandra de CastroFinding the most efficient and safest route for drones while delivering goods, understanding user interactions on social media, and investigating chemicals for toxicity prediction are entirely different problems. However, they all share an interesting feature: they are best represented by graphs.A graph is a simple drawing composed of dots (called nodes) and lines (called edges), where the nodes represent entities, and the edges represent the relationships between t...

PASQAL • June 8 2023

Novel Algorithm Can Help Design Medicines With Quantum Computing

Written by Alexandra de CastroComputational methods for designing medicines have greatly advanced alongside experimental approaches, significantly contributing to drug development by saving time and reducing costs. An interesting strategy for drug design involves finding the optimal chemical compound — from a large collection of molecule structures — that optimizes (minimizes or maximizes) a “figure of merit”. The figure of merit could be, for instance, the binding free energy, which gives the a...

UAM • March 9 2023

Simulating phases of matter in magnetic materials with qubits | United Academics Magazine

Investigating the collective behavior of atoms or molecules leading to phases of matter is crucial to understand phenomena such as magnetization, superfluidity, and superconductivity. The laws of quantum physics govern the underlying dynamic of such collective behavior; however, simulating the quantum dynamics involving large number of atoms is often impossible for classical computers.


In 1982, Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman anticipated that this difficulty might be overcome by using a co...

UAM • July 15 2022

James Webb’s Deep Field, A Colorful Time Tunnel  | United Academics Magazine

In the beginning—about 400,000 years after the Big Bang— darkness was upon the face of the deep. The light was trapped inside the neutral atoms and molecules, mostly hydrogen, helium, and a pinch of lithium. By the end of the Cosmic Dark Ages, a few hundred million years later, those hydrogen clouds eventually gathered and gravitationally collapsed, forming the first stars and galaxies. Nuclear reactions kicked off inside those infant stars, creating the first heavier elements ever, allowing the...

UAM • April 4 2022

Europe Will Power the Flight of the Next Man and First Woman to the Moon | United Academics Magazine

The dark, silver desert longs for the pressure of our feet again. The Artemis program aims for this next big step for humanity, not to visit, but to stay on the Moon.


The six Artemis missions consist of three phases: flying humans to the Moon and back to the Earth on board the Orion spaceship, assembling a space station orbiting the Moon, and landing on the Moon’s surface. 


The first phase involves significant European participation. Under contract with the European Space Agency, the compa...

UAM • July 24 2021

Scientists reveal Mars’ inner structure | United Academics Magazine

When the Greeks observed the errant lights in the sky—which they named planets—they probably never envisioned that, one day, we could actually reach the surfaces of some of them to explore their bowels. 


In May 2018, NASA launched the mission InSight: Interior exploration, Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport. Upon its successful arrival on the surface of Mars in November 2018, the lander has been working tirelessly, listening to the inner “voices” of Mars.  


After almost a...