Q-CTRL

For drug discovery teams, speed and accuracy often come at a trade-off. Discovering a new drug already takes years, and predictions that are too slow or not accurate enough only add to that timeline. To tackle this, Qubit Pharmaceuticals partnered with Q-CTRL to build a hybrid quantum-classical workflow that predicts hydration sites inside protein binding pockets, a key step in understanding how drugs bind to their targets. Using the Fire Opal Optimization Solver, the team found the optimal solution in 25 minutes, whereas an exact classical solver stalled at a 40% optimality gap after three hours. The predictions also matched the precision of established classical tools. The workflow ran on IBM Quantum Heron processor using up to 123 qubits across multiple pharmaceutical protein systems. The team also found that prediction accuracy improves as qubit count grows, pointing to a workflow that scales as quantum processors reach 900 qubits and beyond. We're excited to share that this work has been published in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Research. Read the full case study: https://buff.ly/Q746rSR Link to the paper: https://buff.ly/qpo8K8e #QuantumComputing #DrugDiscovery #ComputationalChemistry #QuantumOptimization

With the proliferation of GPS jamming and spoofing devices, outages are becoming an active threat across aviation and defense. Our CEO and Founder, Michael Biercuk, breaks down how quantum sensing is delivering resilient navigation during his keynote at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Future conference. Ironstone Opal, our quantum-assured navigation system, provides unjammable, unspoofable, and undetectable positioning when GPS is unavailable or untrusted. Through AI-driven software ruggedization, we are enabling quantum sensors to perform in the field by shielding sensitive hardware against noise and vibration. #Quantum #Defense #Aviation #Navigation #MIT #EmTech https://buff.ly/03iVp8S

Today, seeing GPS jamming affect multiple United flights near LA, a route and airline I take regularly, was a sharp reminder that electronic warfare isn't just happening far away in combat zones like Ukraine or the Persian Gulf: https://lnkd.in/gtxPk3gm. GPS interference is an urgent civilian and economic reality. Over 1,500 commercial flights face GPS denial every day, and NIST estimates losing GPS service would cost the US alone $1 billion in economic value per day. That’s why I’m so proud of what we’re building at Q-CTRL. Through Ironstone Opal, we’re deploying quantum-assured navigation. Working alongside leaders like Airbus, we combine quantum sensors, magnetic sensing tech, and advanced software to ensure safe, reliable navigation even when GPS fails. Read more about how we're tackling this issue, or reach out if you'd like to collaborate: https://lnkd.in/grCj4h-Y.

Every quantum computer has to be tuned before it can do anything useful. That work still falls to the experts you hired to do research, and it can take days. Boulder Opal does it instead. On a QuantWare D-Line QPU, Boulder Opal characterizes the entire device and defines all relevant parameters on its own, in minutes per feedline. It runs with zero human intervention and no workflow for your team to build, then returns a fully characterized device, ready to calibrate, along with the complete record of how it got there. The video shows a sample of the plots and data characterization returns. This is what lands in your dashboard. Quantum computer calibration has been treated as an unavoidable cost of owning a quantum computer. We think it should be infrastructure that simply works, so your team can spend their time on the science they came to do. 🔗 Learn about autonomous calibration in our recent blog: https://buff.ly/zmVfPdI Start your 30-day free trial of Boulder Opal here: https://buff.ly/pwNrlWY

As quantum computers grow, calibrating and bringing them online becomes increasingly complex. Automated bring-up helps hardware teams keep pace and get devices up and running sooner. Next month at Q+AI 3.0 in New York, Q-CTRL Lead Product Manager for Quantum Computing, James Guilmart joins the panel "Rise of the Machines: Automated Bring-Up." The panel examines what automated bring-up actually looks like in practice, and why it's becoming essential as quantum systems scale to hundreds and thousands of qubits. If you work on quantum hardware or you're interested in where AI and automation fit into quantum computing, add this session to your agenda. It's a great opportunity to hear the discussion firsthand and connect with the panelists afterward. Register here: https://buff.ly/tiZjkNs #QuantumComputing #QuantumCalibration #QuantumControl #qubit Inside Quantum Technology

As artificial intelligence advances toward recursive self-improvement, identifying the optimal neural network architecture becomes an exponential search challenge that pushes classical computing limits. Quantum computing offers a direct path through this optimization bottleneck. In a recent Data Center Knowledge analysis on the operational impacts of self-improving AI, Q-CTRL Lead Product Manager Jay Guilmart highlights how quantum algorithms, such as Grover's algorithm, accelerate these complex calculations. Quantum speedups are poised to enable recursive AI operations to evaluate high-dimensional model choices efficiently and select top-performing options without overwhelming compute infrastructure. #QuantumComputing #AI #DataCenter https://buff.ly/HtQJbu6

Thanks to IBM Quantum and Scott Crowder for featuring Q-CTRL on stage at Quantum World Congress, and to Nicholas for capturing the moment. Want the full story behind the results? Read how Fire Opal is setting the standard for quantum execution speed on IBM Quantum Nighthawk: https://lnkd.in/grVJcjRe

Looking forward to talking about Q-CTRL’s recent demonstration of practical quantum advantage later today at AIDAQ – AI, Data & Quantum Summit.

IBM Quantum Nighthawk R2 is IBM's fastest quantum processor yet. Here's what happens when you add Fire Opal. We reran our utility-scale fermionic simulation benchmark on the new ibm_phoenix. It executes 12 times faster than the ibm_boston baseline, with less than 1% deviation in results. → Circuit scale of 60 active qubits, 4,497 two-qubit gates, and a 2Q depth of 152 → 23 seconds of pipeline execution time, down from 4 minutes 25 seconds → At least 400 times faster than the fastest classical GPU cluster Fire Opal delivers automated error suppression with zero shot overhead, using AI-driven gate and circuit-level optimizations to eliminate crosstalk across complex layouts and unlock maximum circuit depth without manual intervention. These capabilities are now available on all IBM Quantum Nighthawk QPUs through the Q-CTRL Performance Management and Optimization Solver Qiskit Functions on the IBM Quantum Platform. You can also reproduce these results firsthand with Fire Opal’s dynamics simulator function or accelerate financial workloads with our new Monte Carlo integration via the Fire Opal Client. 🔗 Read the blog: https://buff.ly/sEU8uEo Thanks to the IBM Quantum team for another impressive device. #QuantumComputing #Qiskit #MaterialsSimulation

What happens when quantum sensing makes it possible to measure the world with entirely new levels of precision? Q-CTRL CEO and Founder Michael J. Biercuk will deliver a keynote session at EmTech MIT, exploring how advances in quantum sensing are pushing beyond the limits of existing systems and why that may become one of the most surprising and consequential applications of the field. #Navigation #Quantum #Sensing #MIT https://buff.ly/lOV1ycR