Almost exactly a year ago, we ran an ambitious experiment. The goal was to make a quantum computer do something that was impossible before and would also be practically useful. Today, I am proud to announce the results of that work through a paper in Nature. In it, we use a quantum computer to realize the task of generating “Certified Randomness” — a special kind of randomness which comes with a ‘proof’ of randomness that can be verified by anyone. Randomness is used everywhere — in lotteries, in jury selections, in selecting who to audit. With certified randomness, you can be confident that such sensitive decisions are made fairly, using genuine randomness, untampered by a malicious adversary. You can be sure that the security keys you use for encryption come from a truly random source. What’s more, you can now prove the integrity of your system to others. This opens up new opportunities within cryptography. We can generally use certified randomness to augment existing entropy sources, towards making opaque decision processes more transparent, towards  ever more layers of trust. We present some initial thoughts in an accompanying paper. But clearly, there is a lot more to do. This work was made possible with a heroic collaboration between federal laboratories, universities, startups and financial institutions spread all across USA. This collaboration — which includes @jpmorgan, @QuantinuumQC , @argonne, @ORNL, @UTAustin — brought together theoretical expertise, state-of-the-art quantum computers and world’s most powerful supercomputers. From a long list of people behind this work, I would like to specially thank my closest collaborators @ruslanquantum and @henryken_liu for being a part of this journey, as well as JPMorganChase leadership — Marco Pistoia, Lori Beer and Jamie Dimon — for creating an environment that makes breakthroughs like this possible. pradeepniroula.com/certified…

Register for the Chicago Quantum Recruiting Forum by tomorrow @ 12:00 pm CT to be included in the resume book! This annual event brings together the rising generation of #quantum scientists with employers/educators for an event aimed at catalyzing careers: chicagoquantum.org/events/20…

Hardness of the maximum-independent-set problem on unit-disk graphs and prospects for quantum speedups, Ruben S. Andrist et al @ruslanquantum @gromitsun @marco_pistoia @jpmorgan @RYalovetzky #Quantum #AtomicPhysics #Optics go.aps.org/3RAwPmU