However, the promise of quantum supercomputers is hampered by nature, according to Professor Michael Biercuk, a physicist from University of Sydney whose start-up, Q-Ctrl, is one of the first four investees announced by Main Sequence Ventures, a "deep tech" manager funded with $100 million by the federal government and the CSIRO.

Memory refresh

"Quantum systems lose their quantumness over time. They react with their environments and get randomised – it's hardware independent, all quantum systems suffer from it," he told The Australian Financial Review.

Q-Ctrl has developed software which sits directly above the qubits and claims to manipulate them in order to stabilise them.

"Some of the physics we're using goes back to the development of magnetic resonance imaging in the 1950s," Professor Biercuk said.

Some believe a truly useful quantum computer could still be decades away. Supplied

Q-Ctrl's software had the potential to be as ubiquitous in quantum computing as the process of "memory refresh" had become in traditional dynamic random access memory (DRAM) systems, he claimed.

"DRAM systems have the same tendency toward what physicists call decoherence, where a switch can turn to a 'one' or a 'zero' randomly and be of no use to anyone. With refresh they figured out how to control the memory cells to protect erasure, so even if the underlying hardware is faulty it appears stabilised to the user," Professor Biercuk said.


The refresh process had made DRAM cheap to manufacture – around $2.50 per gigabyte – and Q-Ctrl's similar solution could accelerate the affordability of qubits, he added.

Professor Biercuk claimed that an algorithm-driven solution to qubit errors called quantum error control, that some developers are employing further up the software stack, remained "resource intensive and expensive".

The tools Q-Ctrl is building have had their performance validated in the University of Sydney quantum computing laboratory, Professor Biercuk claimed.

"We've shown orders of magnitude of improvement in reducing qubit errors without the need for changing the underlying hardware."

Level of incredulity

Q-Ctrl will shortly be tested on IBM's open-source quantum computing platform, QISKit.



"Having known Michael's strong academic work in quantum controls for many years and being part of the same IARPA programs on quantum computing for seven years, we are interested to explore how Q-Ctrl will fit within the growing quantum community to advance the world towards practical quantum computing," said Jerry Chow, manager of experimental quantum computing at IBM Research.

The investment of "several million dollars" from Main Sequence and a Hong Kong-based venture capital firm will be used to build a team of around 10 quantum control engineers and software developers in Sydney over the next 18 months, Professor Biercuk said.

As a former management consultant to the US Department of Defence, Professor Biercuk claimed "above-average business acumen" by academic standards, but admitted the leap from lab to venture-backed boardroom would test him.

"The level of incredulity you need toward claims in academia needs to balanced with the glass-half-full, opportunity seeking mindset of the commercial sector," he said.

"But I'll remain an honest broker about what's possible in quantum computing."

He was confident his investors had the patience required by the emerging qubit-making industry, which some believe could be decades from producing a truly useful quantum computer.