USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computation Center

The USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computation Center (QCC) is a joint scientific research effort between Lockheed Martin Corporation and the University of Southern California (USC). The QCC is housed at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), a computer science and engineering research unit of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and is jointly operated by ISI and Lockheed Martin.

USC faculty, ISI researchers and students are performing basic and applied research into quantum computing, and are collaborating with researchers around the world. The QCC uses a D-Wave Two quantum annealing system, manufactured by D-Wave Systems, Inc. The QCC is the first organization outside of D-Wave to operate the system. The second system is installed at NASA Ames Research Center, and is operated jointly by NASA and Google. The systems must be kept extremely cold and electromagnetically well-shielded to operate with the longest possible coherence time.

Quantum information processing, also called quantum computing, theoretically is known to offer dramatic speed-ups and more complete answers for some combinatorial computing problems. Quantum annealing is a branch of quantum computing whose advantages over classical computing are actively being investigated. In quantum annealing, problems are encoded into the lowest energy state of a physical quantum system. Applications currently under study at the QCC include big data analysis, verification and validation of cyber-physical systems, pattern identification and classification, and optimization and machine learning, any of which may support breakthroughs in multiple industries and government.

USC and ISI researchers, as well as Lockheed Martin engineers, seek to develop methods to benchmark quantum annealers, and perform tests of quantumness. These include the study of quantum entanglement and, more generally, the performance of quantum annealing experiments.

Researchers also are working to manage quantum decoherence, the phenomenon that degrades the performance of quantum information processors when quantum states are forced out of quantum superposition. Decoherence can reduce quantum functionality to that of a classical computer, and can be counteracted using quantum error correction. QCC researchers and their collaborators have developed methods to counteract decoherence in quantum annealers by combining quantum error correction with energy penalties that suppress decoherence into a single quantum annealing correction method.

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