Google announced Tuesday that it is working with the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) to create quantum-computing processors that run on superconducting electronics.
The effort will be achieved through a collaboration between the search giant's Quantum Artificial Intelligence team and a group of researchers led by UCSB physicist John Martinis, who is currently working as a joint employee of Google and the university, according to PC Magazine.
Hartmut Neven, director of engineering at Google, wrote in a blog post that Martinis and his team "have made great strides" in their work in quantum computing. Martinis' pioneering achievements in the area recently allowed him to receive the London Prize.
"With an integrated hardware group the Quantum AI team will now be able to implement and test new designs for quantum optimization and inference processors based on recent theoretical insights as well as our learnings from the D-Wave quantum annealing architecture," Neven said.
The project will be the second that Google has started in the field. The company already works with Canadian startup D-Wave Systems on quantum computers. D-Wave has sold one of these machines to Google and NASA, as well as to Lockhheed Martin, International Business Times reported.
The goal for the project is to develop computers that have much higher processing power and speed compared to conventional computers that still run on silicon-based semiconductor chips.
The Quantum AI Lab was started in May of 2013 through Google's collaboration with the NASA Ames Research Center and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), PC Magazine reported.
"We're studying the application of quantum optimization for difficult problems in Artificial Intelligence," the group wrote on its Google+ page.
Google will continue to work with D-Wave scientists and conduct experiments with NASA's "Vesuvirus" machine. Quantum AI is looking to increase the speed of computing on a large scale so that researchers have a better way to study patterns in weather systems, the stock market and other areas.
