Public Funding for Orca Computing Limited

Multiplexing and switching are staple techniques of the telecoms industry, allowing information to be carried simultaneously across time, frequency and spatial channels and therefore unlocking the ultra-high data speeds that we have all grown to rely upon. Multiplexing and switching also have a role to play when designing a network to connect quantum computers, but despite several early-stage demonstrations, the performance of underpinning components- switches, frequency converters and quantum memories has so-far been below the threshold needed to enable scalable networking. For the first time ever, this project delivers a suite of networking technologies, which have been specifically designed such that they can achieve above-threshold performance. The project will end with a final network demonstration with high-efficiency multiplexing and switching components used together to overcome significant bottlenecks in the networking and scaling up of quantum computers.

Q-REALM Wind is a feasibility study being undertaken by EY and ORCA Computing, together with critical input from a multi-national energy producer to explore the potential of using generative modelling techniques on ORCA's PT-Series photonic quantum processor for onshore and offshore wind farm location optimisation. The objective of the project is to assess the impact of novel algorithms that use data science and quantum computing (vs traditional techniques) to optimise the placement of wind turbines for maximum energy output and cost efficiency, while considering various environmental and regulatory considerations. The project is particularly timely because of the imperative to improve the UK's energy security while simultaneously helping more organisations achieve net-zero. The project aims to show that more efficient use can be made of the nation's resources, thus delivering a better return on the investment in renewables, as well as improving the stability and reliability of wind power to minimise power transmission loss and reduce dependencies on fossil-fuel backup. The project also encourages further innovation within the renewables industry by showcasing the potential for quantum computing to be used in other parts of the supply chain -- from more efficient turbine design to reliable operation over the long lives of these assets. In addition, this project will help to demonstrate the feasibility of near-term quantum computing applications and encourage more organisations to start their journey to quantum readiness. The project also builds on EY's broad base of research and thought leadership in quantum computing and AI, allowing the project team to explore quantum readiness in a hands-on fashion, while bringing to bear EY's & ORCA's breadth and depth in AI, data science, and the energy domain.

AI models have rapidly become the basis of an organization's core operation and repository of its intellectual property. In the case of an enterprise, models can be their very business model. In addition, with the costs of training generative AI systems potentially running into the millions or 10's of millions of dollars, there has been increasing interest in developing methods to prevent the extraction or theft of a trained model. Even when a model is hosted on a device controlled by the model's creator, it may be vulnerable to hackers through gaps in the model creator's security systems, and there is no technical protection against accidental leaks or malicious acts by employees. Companies must resort to legal protections only to protect their models from these leaks. We propose a quantum fingerprinting solution for securing trained generative models from hackers or from accidental or malicious leaks. This project will be led by ORCA Computing, who were formed in October 2019 as a spin-off from Professor Ian Walmsley's ultra-fast quantum optics group at the University of Oxford and is now based in West London with over 40 employees.

AI models have rapidly become the basis of an organization's core operation and repository of its intellectual property. In the case of an enterprise, models can be their very business model. In addition, with the costs of training generative AI systems potentially running into the millions or 10's of millions of dollars, there has been increasing interest in developing methods to prevent the extraction or theft of a trained model. Even when a model is hosted on a device controlled by the model's creator, it may be vulnerable to hackers through gaps in the model creator's security systems, and there is no technical protection against accidental leaks or malicious acts by employees. Companies must resort to legal protections only to protect their models from these leaks. We propose a quantum fingerprinting solution for securing trained generative models from hackers or from accidental or malicious leaks. This project will be led by ORCA Computing, who were formed in October 2019 as a spin-off from Professor Ian Walmsley's ultra-fast quantum optics group at the University of Oxford and is now based in West London with over 40 employees.

Satellite data provides opportunities for governments and businesses around the world in scientific, socio-economic management and commercial applications. Access to timely, reliable, and actionable information is increasingly critical to a growing number of organizations and decision makers who rely on earth observation data. Gaining useful insights from satellite images can be difficult due to sources of noise such as sensor processing errors, clouds or atmospheric perturbations, the low spatial resolution of typical satellite images, and revisit times on the order of a few hours to days. Holes or gaps in of missing pixel information introduces uncertainty and affects decision making capabilities of stakeholders who rely on accurate information for near-real-time monitoring and inference purposes. Traditionally, classical generative AI methods such as GANs or diffusion models have been used to address these issues. However, these methods require significant computational resources and suffer from issues such as mode collapse in GANs. ORCA Computing will deliver a hybrid quantum/classical generative algorithm for satellite image processing both to reduce the computational resources required to train models and to improve their performance. This algorithm uses ORCA's PT-Series quantum processor and unique software stack. This solution will be beneficial for satellite monitoring purposes in areas such as climate and weather monitoring, defence, the environment and agriculture.

Satellite data provides opportunities for governments and businesses around the world in scientific, socio-economic management and commercial applications. Access to timely, reliable, and actionable information is increasingly critical to a growing number of organizations and decision makers who rely on earth observation data. Gaining useful insights from satellite images can be difficult due to sources of noise such as sensor processing errors, clouds or atmospheric perturbations, the low spatial resolution of typical satellite images, and revisit times on the order of a few hours to days. Holes or gaps in of missing pixel information introduces uncertainty and affects decision making capabilities of stakeholders who rely on accurate information for near-real-time monitoring and inference purposes. Traditionally, classical generative AI methods such as GANs or diffusion models have been used to address these issues. However, these methods require significant computational resources and suffer from issues such as mode collapse in GANs. ORCA Computing will deliver a hybrid quantum/classical generative algorithm for satellite image processing both to reduce the computational resources required to train models and to improve their performance. This algorithm uses ORCA's PT-Series quantum processor and unique software stack. This solution will be beneficial for satellite monitoring purposes in areas such as climate and weather monitoring, defence, the environment and agriculture.

Quantum Computing is a highly disruptive technology that has the potential to completely change the way that people approach and use data centres and high-performance computing. The step-change that quantum computing offers should not be understated- it has the potential to radically change the way that individuals use, work with and purchase computing infrastructure. This disruption to the status quo requires us to rethink how individuals and companies start, identify and deliver new solutions. ORCA computing is a company at the leading edge of that market, with multiple projects underway to supply customers with their first ever quantum computer. However, for ORCA and both the rest of the market there is surprisingly little understanding about how customers really want to use quantum computers, and which steps they need to take to become successful at adopting this radical new technology. This is critical to understand if those customers are to continue with this technology throughout its potentially long journey to widespread adoption. Over the next 12 months, ORCA will be supplying a number of leading companies and institutions with their first ever quantum computer to be deployed between October 2022 and June 2023\. This supply provides a unique opportunity to observe the customer journey through the initial contact, installation, understanding-building and adoption of quantum computing. Rather than only concerning technical specifications, this project will -- for the first time ever- be looking at that journey through a design and human lens. Through a partnership between ORCA Computing and the design company the Alloy, the two companies will conduct interviews and site visits of ORCA's customers and use that to carry out a double-diamond process to determine the journey, challenges and opportunities of the users in this completely new field of technology. This will lead the project team to put forward highly desirable, design- centred new service, software and hardware products. Quantum computing needn't just be about qubits, speeds and feeds. This project will look at the future of quantum from the human perspective. It will lead the way towards human value creation that will sustain the quantum computing's future for decades to come.

Quantum Computing is a highly disruptive technology that has the potential to completely change the way that people approach and use data centres and high-performance computing. The step-change that quantum computing offers should not be understated- it has the potential to radically change the way that individuals use, work with and purchase computing infrastructure. This disruption to the status quo requires us to rethink how individuals and companies start, identify and deliver new solutions. ORCA computing is a company at the leading edge of that market, with multiple projects underway to supply customers with their first ever quantum computer. However, for ORCA and both the rest of the market there is surprisingly little understanding about how customers really want to use quantum computers, and which steps they need to take to become successful at adopting this radical new technology. This is critical to understand if those customers are to continue with this technology throughout its potentially long journey to widespread adoption. Over the next 12 months, ORCA will be supplying a number of leading companies and institutions with their first ever quantum computer to be deployed between October 2022 and June 2023\. This supply provides a unique opportunity to observe the customer journey through the initial contact, installation, understanding-building and adoption of quantum computing. Rather than only concerning technical specifications, this project will -- for the first time ever- be looking at that journey through a design and human lens. Through a partnership between ORCA Computing and the design company the Alloy, the two companies will conduct interviews and site visits of ORCA's customers and use that to carry out a double-diamond process to determine the journey, challenges and opportunities of the users in this completely new field of technology. This will lead the project team to put forward highly desirable, design- centred new service, software and hardware products. Quantum computing needn't just be about qubits, speeds and feeds. This project will look at the future of quantum from the human perspective. It will lead the way towards human value creation that will sustain the quantum computing's future for decades to come.

Quantum technologies have demonstrated the potential for vast technological improvements in communication, metrology, and computation. Although there are a variety of ways to leverage quantum technologies, photonic technologies -- those which are based upon encoding information in light -- are an exciting paradigm. Photons can be transmitted over complex free-space or fibre networks with minimal decoherence. This is due to their weak interaction with other fields or particles. Although this is a desirable feature, it also becomes a technical challenge as this leads to the requirement of probabilistic protocols for quantum information processing. Over recent decades, successive advances in laser science and atomic physics have made it possible to store and then retrieve, on demand, photonic information in an atomic vapour, therefore transitioning from probabilistic to deterministic protocols. This is named a photonic quantum memory. A substantial limiting factor in this technology is due to the motion of the atoms in which the photonic information is stored, leading to a reduction in memory lifetime. While long-lifetime quantum memories in ultracold-atom systems have previously been demonstrated, to date, these have only been laboratory demonstrations, and not commercially viable. The goal of this feasibility study is to leverage ColdQuanta's ultracold-atom technology to build a photonic quantum memory using laser-cooled atoms, showcasing state-of-the-art memory lifetime in a commercially scalable platform. In the coming decade, we anticipate devices built upon these techniques to become widespread as key components of vast quantum computing networks.

MANGROVE will develop novel integrated-photonic circuits that could be incorporated into ORCA's products and unlock significant new opportunities in the quantum research, computing, communications and imaging markets.

Single photons are the workhorse of the future quantum technology industry, being a fundamental component to high fidelity quantum computing, quantum communications, quantum imaging and some types of quantum sensing. However, to date, no truly single photon sources of high quality, high efficiency, indistinguishable exists on the market. Current single photon sources on the market are not ideal for many reasons. All, including ORCA's current source, are very far from being 'on demand' with efficiencies between 1-15% (firing 'blanks' for most of the time, with spaces where the single photons should be). The most efficient sources that have been demonstrated are complex free space experiments, which achieve efficiencies of 30%+, however, these are far from being suitable for a reliable product. Quantum dot sources can achieve efficiencies of 15%, but are unstable, due to the properties of the photons drifting from one photon to another, or from one source to another. All of these properties diminish the quality, also known as the fidelity of interactions between photons, and make them fundamentally poorer in performance when used for quantum computing and communications (for example, limiting how far photonic quantum computers can be scaled up). In this project, temporal multiplexing techniques from ORCA's previous Innovate UK project 'Manatee' will be implemented alongside a completely new spectrally multiplexing technique. Together, the two techniques will be combined in a prototype product with unparalleled performance and efficiency.

Data centres, and the networks and systems that surround them are the future work horse of digitised economies. The data processing that they provide is a well-known driver for economic growth, providing cutting edge storage and computing systems that increasingly underpin all aspects of business and society. These data centres are huge system of systems, comprising thousands of components coming from a diverse, global supply chain. To account for the ever growing amount and complexity of data that needs to be processed these systems are becoming more complex and have started to incorporate novel chip sets within heterogeneous architectures to provide more efficient training of machine learning problems. Quantum technologies, has long been described as the solution to the world's most challenging data problems. Quantum computing has the ability to significantly enhance our ability to process optimisation, machine learning and sorting problems which are beyond the reach of today's computers, and quantum communications provides the answer to ever-increasing challenges of security. However, to date, very little activity has taken place to understand from a systems perspective how quantum technologies can integrate with existing data centres. Quantum computers and communications systems are often described in isolation, more or less at-odds with the direction of the industry for the last 50 years. This misses the possibility for very significant near term value to be created with quantum/classical hybrid systems. For the first time ever, this project seeks look at quantum technologies through the lens of the existing industry. It brings together experts in classical data centres and networking, quantum computing and quantum communications and will develop a blueprint for a quantum/classical hybrid data centre and a quantum internet.

We are developing photonic quantum computers that will use individual particles of light known as photons to carry out computational tasks in more powerful ways than conventional supercomputers. However, operations in photonic quantum computers are fundamentally unreliable, hence memory elements are required to store successful outcomes of quantum logic gates until all have functioned correctly. One way of storing light in a material system is by mapping the quantum state of a photon into a collective excitation of a cloud of atoms using an energy level transition mediated by a bright laser beam. The photon can then be retrieved a few hundreds of nanoseconds later by switching the laser on again. Although the storage time seems short, it is sufficient to buffer enough gates to build large-scale photonic quantum processors. Unfortunately, the atoms with the best energy levels for this application are rubidium -- a highly reactive element that is difficult to handle -- and existing quantum memories are limited by the characteristics of the vapour cells in which the rubidium must be contained. In this project, we will design, build, and test advanced vapour cells that contain clouds of rubidium atoms in the hollow cores of special optical fibres. This will ensure not only that the reactive rubidium remains protected from the environment but also that light can interact with atoms over the whole length of the hollow fibre. Combined with the ease with which our compact fibre memory modules will integrate with other optical components, the products that we develop will enable a much larger number of memories be operated simultaneously at much higher efficiencies than was previously possible. This will open up new markets both within the scientific and technological development of quantum computation and beyond in the applications of photonic quantum computers to societal challenges including drug discovery, industrial process optimisation, or modelling new materials for batteries and solar cells.

The goal of this project is to develop a source of time/frequency-entangled photon pairs suitable for multipurpose quantum communications in daylight conditions the context of next generation wireless communications. The large background noise due to solar radiation limits satellite-to-ground and, in general, free-space entanglement distribution to night operation, strongly reducing the time of operation of quantum communications links. In this project, we propose to investigate integrated narrow-linewidth sources of entangled photons. The project will also explore the opportunities from flying the source on future Arqit satellites to validate it for future Quantum Communications networks and for entanglement distribution experiments with international partners for a variety of applications in the context of the future Quantum Internet.

One of the largest outstanding challenges faced by photonic quantum computing is how to scale these systems based on existing single photon sources. Single photons are natural carriers of quantum information. They are robust to thermal noise, can be used at room-temperature and sent over optical fibre networks. This makes them particularly suitable for generation, manipulation, and long-range transport of entanglement. However, existing sources of single photons are probabilistic; they do not generate a steady stream of high-quality, predictable photons on demand. This forces developers to build photonic quantum computers with large amounts of redundancy, repeating many copies of the underlying components over and over in the hope that at least some portion of the operation is successful. This approach is not efficient or readily scalable. ORCA Computing have developed a new approach to quantum computing based on a proprietary photonic quantum memory; a means of storing and retrieving successful quantum states on demand. This approach reduces the cost, footprint, and energy use of quantum operations and is designed to be scalable using mature telecoms components; but it still requires a compatible source of single photons that are tailored to interact with the memory. Covesion are a world leading manufacturer of nonlinear optical crystals, a photonics technology used to convert standard telecoms lasers to single photons for use with quantum systems. Using cutting-edge fabrication techniques recently developed at the University of Southampton, this project will develop a new class of spectrally-tailored nonlinear crystals designed to operate, integrate, and commercially scale with ORCA's innovative quantum memory platform.

While the rise of artificial intelligence and big data are often presented as the answer to the challenge of big data, they also present a significant challenge to the environment. As the size and complexity of AI algoritms grows, the energy consumption and environmental cost related to training those algorithms and analysing data is growing at an alarming rate. For example, the average cost of training an AI algorithm is as much as 284 tonnes, five times the emissions of an average car, and the amount of computing time and energy needed has doubled every 3.4 months since 2012\. ORCA computing are a brand new photonic computing company, spun out from the University of Oxford in November 2019\. In this project, ORCA will develop a prototype photonic integrated processor system that can enable significant speed up and efficiency savings over the AI accelerator products on the market today.

The UK has world leading capability in scalable, high fidelity qubit generation for quantum computing, with two particularly compelling approaches being neutral atoms and ion microtraps. These technologies, however, remain at low TRL because a viable commercialisation approach requires the provision of test beds available to the UK community, and test beds are unavailable owing to two technology barriers -- qubit scalability and fidelity. Providing these test beds requires inter-disciplinary expertise beyond any one company. Our vision for this project is to bring together a such world-leading multidisciplinary consortium of UK industry and academic partners -- the only group capable of overcoming the two barriers and creating a globally leading industry for commercial quantum computing and simulation hardware. The programme will show a transition from fundamental, academic TRL activity to scalable, commercial deployments of cold matter quantum information systems; overcoming the fidelity and scalability barriers via advancement of system manufacturability including microfabrication and vacuum hardware; development of the photonics backbone including advanced lasers for state preparation, qubit control and readout, requiring high levels of optical power, stability and noise suppression; and the design and delivery of electronics and control systems, including modular electronics and advanced control and sequencing hardware. The key objectives in overcoming the barriers as described above is to bring the technology to a level where pragmatic test bed facilities for the benefit of the quantum community can be realised. Commercially, by establishing the potential scalability of the technology the consortium will establish a supply chain cluster, evidencing the potential impact, and producing a roadmap to industrial production. The partners have extensive experience in the sector and can already demonstrate commercial deployment of relevant technologies across the global market for quantum information systems. Furthermore, the planned work can be expected to dovetail with existing national quantum computing infrastructure, to realise coordinated growth of the UK quantum computing sector for the wider benefit of UK plc, and trigger significant additional investment outside the project funding.

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) facilitates the secure sharing of encryption keys using quantum technology. These keys can encrypt data for transmission over conventional fibre links across any distance, but QKD itself is limited over fibre to around 150km. Beyond this, 'trusted nodes' are required, but at major risk of creating security vulnerabilities. A number of fibre QKD networks are being built, including in the UK, but all are subject to this constraint. QKD through free space is less sensitive to distance. Thus, satellites provide the means for distributing keys across very large distances between end users spread across countries or continents - they are a facilitator of global QKD networks. Satellite components in QKD networks are being planned or researched in a number of countries. A consortium led by Arqit aims to establish the world's first commercial QKD satellite constellation. The first satellite is being build under contract with the European Space Agency, with a quantum payload being manufactured by European partners. There is an opportunity for the UK quantum technology industry to leapfrog other countries by creating a capability to manufacture the next generation of space QKD payloads here in the UK. The "Quantum Payload Factory" project will work with organisations across the UK to progress the state of the art of promising quantum communications technologies, understand their potential to enhance the performance of Arqit's global QKD system, validate their capabilities and technology readiness, engineer them to become "space ready" and develop an enhanced performance payload design that brings these new UK technologies into the second generation of Arqit satellites.

no public description

Single photons are the workhorse of the future quantum technology industry, being a fundamental component to high fidelity quantum computing, quantum communications, quantum imaging and some types of quantum sensors. They are also a fundamental step in ORCA's plans to build a fully-scalable, optical fiber based photonic quantum computing platform, which will overcome the connectivity and scaling challenges that other platforms face in the medium-term. However, these fields have been held back because of the availability of high-performance single photon sources. For quantum computing single photons are not deterministic, meaning that it is not certain that they will be produced. Instead, current single photon sources fire 'blanks' for most of the time, with spaces where the single photons should be. For quantum communications the rate at which single photons can be created is also limited, which limits the viability of commercial QKD systems. For many other applications, single photon sources are low maturity, high-cost or require cryogenic cooling; all features which significantly limit the extent of their market uptake. This project will leverage ORCA's patented optical memory technology, know-how in parametric down conversion and optical memories to deliver a highly efficient, deterministic single photon source.