Q# Blog
Quantum Development
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Blog Migration on February 5th
We are thrilled to announce that the Q# blog will be moving to a new home at Azure Quantum Technical Blog on February 5, 2025. This will enable us to offer you a more seamless and enhanced experience through a single integrated platform, featuring the latest information and resources in quantum computing. Best regards, The Azure Quantum Team
Important Update: blog migration to quantum.microsoft.com
We are excited to announce that the Q# blog will be migrating to a new home at Azure Quantum in Feb 2025. This move will allow us to provide you with a more integrated and enhanced experience, featuring the latest updates and resources in the world of quantum computing. Stay tuned for more details and thank you for being a valued member of our community!
Resource Estimation Challenge at QRISE 2024: Recap
This spring, we partnered with Quantum Coalition to offer a challenge at QRISE 2024 - a six-week-long event aiming to get students started doing research projects in areas of interest in quantum computing industry. Meet the challenge winners and learn about their projects!
Integrated Hybrid Support in the Azure Quantum Development Kit
Some quantum computers can do more than execute a static sequence of gates. The most advanced ones can perform mid-circuit measurements, conditionally execute gates, perform real-time classical computations and re-use qubits. If you want to experiment with these state-of-the-art capabilities, we have good news for you. The Azure Quantum Development Kit now supports running hybrid quantum programs on hardware targets. This kind of program combines classical and quantum computations; thus, we refer to them as hybrid quantum programs. Last year, we released Azure Quantum’s Integrated Hybrid feature, enabling user...
Evaluating cat qubits for fault-tolerant quantum computing using Azure Quantum Resource Estimator
Introduction This blog post highlights a recent collaboration between Microsoft and Alice & Bob, a French startup whose goal is to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer by leveraging a superconducting qubit called a cat qubit. In this collaboration, Alice & Bob uses the new extensibility mechanisms of Microsoft’s Resource Estimator to obtain resource estimates for their cat qubit architecture. The Resource Estimator is a tool that can help evaluate the practical benefit of quantum algorithms. It calculates an estimate for the expected runtime and the number of physical qubits needed to run a given pro...
Circuit Diagrams with Q#
If you’ve been exploring quantum programming using Q#, you may have been thinking, “This language is great and so easy to use! But what about visual learners?” I’m a software engineer in the Azure Quantum Development Kit team, and I’m very excited to share a new feature I’ve been working on: circuit visualization in Q#. One of the neat things about Q# is that it gives you the ability to express quantum algorithms in a procedural language that’s reminiscent of classical programming languages such as C and Python. If you’re already a programmer, this way of thinking will be very intuitive to you, and you can ...
Exploring space-time tradeoffs with Azure Quantum Resource Estimator
Introduction We are delighted to present a new experience for exploring space-time tradeoffs recently added to the Azure Quantum Resource Estimator. Available both as Azure Quantum Development Kit (VS Code extension) and a Python package, it adds a new dimension to estimates. Resource estimation doesn't just yield a single group of numbers (one per objective), but rather multiple points representing tradeoffs between objectives, such as qubit number and runtime. Our recent update of the Azure Quantum Resource Estimator adds methods for finding such tradeoffs for a given quantum algorithm and a given quantum c...
Design Fault Tolerant Quantum Computing applications with the open-source Resource Estimator
We are excited to announce that following its initial release the Azure Quantum Resource Estimator is now open-source. It has been integrated with the Modern QDK making it run up to 100x faster, and running across PC, Mac, Linux or from your web browser. Try it now. Why is resource estimation relevant today? Quantum computing has the potential for widespread societal and scientific impact, and many applications have been proposed for quantum computers. The quantum community has reached a consensus that NISQ machines do not offer practical quantum advantage and that it is time to graduate to the next of the thre...
Announcing v1.0 of the Azure Quantum Development Kit
Today we are excited to announce the 1.0 release of the Azure Quantum Development Kit, which we often refer to simply as "the QDK". As outlined in an earlier blog post, this is a significant re-write over the prior QDK with an emphasis on speed, simplicity, and a delightful experience. Review that post for the technical details on how we rebuilt it, but at a product level the re-write has enabled us to make some incredible improvements that exceeded the expectations we set out with, some highlights being: And much more! This post will include lots of video clips to try and high...
Interning at Microsoft Quantum – 2024
We announce Microsoft Quantum research internships for summer 2024 and share some completed intern projects from this summer.
Defining logical qubits: Criteria for Resilient Quantum Computation
As an industry, we are all collectively committed to bringing scaled quantum computing to fruition. Understanding what it will take to reach this goal is crucial not just for measuring industry progress, but also for developing a robust strategy to build a quantum machine and a quantum-ready community. That’s why in June 2023, we offered how quantum computing must graduate through three implementation levels to achieve utility scale: Level 1 Foundational, Level 2 Resilient, Level 3 Scale. All quantum computing technologies today are at Level 1, and while numerous NISQ machines have been developed, they do not of...
Calculating resource estimates for cryptanalysis
We’re excited to release the Resource Estimation and Cryptography interactive experience in Azure Quantum. This experience offers a deep dive into the potential implications of fault-tolerant quantum computing on common cryptographic systems. Thanks to the power of the Azure Quantum Resource Estimator, we can provide estimates of the number of qubits required and expected runtime for a range of quantum algorithms that could be used to break these cryptographic systems across different assumptions of hardware configurations. These estimates help generate actionable insights that can help inform every organization ...
Azure Quantum Integrated Hybrid unlocks algorithmic primitives
To build a quantum supercomputer that can solve the world’s hardest and most complex problems in chemistry and materials science, several key ingredients need to come together. First, today’s foundational-level quantum machines need to be scaled up to a size of at least one million stable and controllable qubits. These are the table stakes for solving any interesting, useful algorithmic problem better or faster than a classical computer, based on what we know from profiling quantum programs using the Azure Quantum resource estimator. Second, they need to be kept stable which means that error correction will be...
Introducing the Azure Quantum Development Kit Preview
100x faster, 100x smaller, and it runs in the browser! The Azure Quantum team is excited to announce the initial preview of the new Azure Quantum Development Kit (or QDK for short). This has been entirely rebuilt using a new codebase on a new technology stack, and this blog post outlines the why, the how, and some of the benefits of doing so. The “tl;dr” is that we rewrote it (mostly) in Rust which compiles to WebAssembly for VS Code or the web, and to native binaries for Python. It’s over 100x smaller, over 100x faster, much easier to install & use, works fully in the browser, and is much more productive...
Modeling quantum architecture with Azure Quantum Resource Estimator
Introduction There are numerous architectural decisions to consider when building quantum computers, which have the potential to address real-world computational challenges like quantum chemistry and quantum cryptography. Researchers worldwide are engaged in developing various aspects of quantum computer architecture. Microsoft Azure Quantum Resource Estimator plays a pivotal role in assessing how different combinations of design choices might impact the performance of upcoming quantum computers. Azure Quantum Resource Estimator was designed to assist researchers in estimating computational time and t...
Mentoring capstone projects at the University of Washington
In this blog post we share our experience of mentoring two capstone projects as part of the "Accelerating Quantum-Enabled Technologies" program at the University of Washington.
Blueprint to organize a quantum computing workshop
For many people, learning a new skill is easiest when it's a shared experience. Quantum computing workshops offer an interactive, structured and co-operative forum to jump start your quantum learning. But how do organize such an event? The Azure Quantum team frequently receives questions on how to organize quantum computing workshops, so we thought it would be helpful to provide some guidance. And Azure Quantum is the ideal platform for quantum workshops because it provides the following: If you want to organize a workshop on quantum computing, this is your guide! Note that this guide ...
Azure Quantum introduces sessions to accelerate your research with variational algorithms
To take full advantage of an Interactive Hybrid architecture, many popular algorithms such as the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) require tight integration between the cloud provider and the quantum hardware manufacturer. Today, Azure Quantum is introducing sessions, freeing you from the need to understand specificities of the cloud provider or quantum manufacturer. With a simple Python API call you can start a session that will logically group your jobs and take advantage of performance optimizations that the quantum manufacturer m...
Azure Quantum unlocks the next generation of Hybrid Quantum Computing
Today, Microsoft announced a significant quantum advancement and made our new Integrated Hybrid feature in Azure Quantum available to the public. Quantum computing is inherently hybrid. The key to unlocking impactful, commercial applications at scale will be deep integration between classical computing capabilities including HPC and AI with scaled quantum computing in the cloud. Now, researchers can begin developing hybrid quantum applications with a mix of classical and quantum code together that run on one of today’s quantum machines, the Quantinuum H-Series in Azure Quantum. This capability unlocks a ne...
Shorter quantum circuits
To solve some of the world’s most challenging problems in chemistry and materials science will require scaling up a quantum computer to a million qubits and beyond [BMTS+ 2022]. Microsoft has taken a more challenging, but what we believe to be a more promising path towards scaled quantum computing and designed our machine using topological qubits. Our unique qubit architecture is theorized to enable our quantum machine to be small enough to fit in a closet, fast enough to solve problems in a practical timeframe, and have the capability to control more than one million qubits. We are confident in this design gi...
Azure Quantum Winter Learning Opportunities
Want to pursue your interests in quantum computing? Start today and sign up for great winter learning opportunities with Azure Quantum.
Festivus: Azure Quantum Feats of Strength
Azure Quantum team celebrates Festivus by listing Azure Quantum feats of strength - their favorite features and tools.
Developing and using Azure Quantum assignments for quantum computing courses
In this blog post Hal Owens writes about his internship project at Microsoft Quantum - developing quantum programming assignments with Q# and bringing them to the classroom at Purdue.
λ-Q#: Understanding and Evolving the Q# Programming Language
λ-Q# is an idealized version of Q# aimed at providing it a formal language definition, placing the language on a solid mathematical foundation, and enabling further evolution of its design and type system.
Signing up for Azure Quantum from scratch
This blog post offers a step-by-step guide to creating your first Azure account and Azure Quantum workspace.
Teaching Quantum Computing with Q# and Azure Quantum at Northeastern University
This fall I taught "Introduction to quantum computing" at Northeastern University. In this post, I share my experience teaching it and describe the kinds of programming assignments the course offered.
Automate Resource Estimation with QIR
Learn how to automate physical resource estimation jobs using the Azure Quantum Resource Estimator and the Azure Quantum Python library.
Q# Holiday Calendar 2022
Q# Holiday Calendar is a yearly blogging event in which every day in December one awesome community member writes a blog post about Q# and/or Azure Quantum. Check out the previous years' blogs and join the 2022 edition!
Microsoft Quantum is hiring software engineers and software researchers!
Learn about the latest job postings for quantum software engineers and researchers at Microsoft Quantum.
Interning at Microsoft Quantum – 2023
We announce Microsoft Quantum research, chemistry, and program management internships for summer 2023 and share some completed intern projects from this summer.
Announcing the Azure Quantum Summer 2022 Hackathon
Join us for the Azure Quantum Summer 2022 Hackathon hosted in collaboration with IEEE QCE22 to learn more about quantum computing and have a chance to win cool prizes.
Quantum Development Kit adopts .NET6 and supports Visual Studio 2022
In March we migrated the Quantum Development Kit to .NET 6.0 and added support for Visual Studio 2022. Learn more here in this post!
PyQIR Projects at UnitaryHACK
We're happy to be supporting UnitaryHACK June 3 - 17. Register to contribute to some great open source PyQIR projects and collect bounties in the process!
Azure Quantum challenge at QCHack 2022: Recap
This April we partnered with IonQ and Quantinuum to offer one of the technical challenges at Quantum Coalition Hackathon 2022. Meet the challenge winners and learn about their projects!
Microsoft/IonQ challenge at iQuHACK 2022: Recap
This January we partnered with IonQ to offer one of the technical challenges at iQuHACK – MIT’s annual quantum hackathon. Meet the challenge winners and learn about their projects!
Testing large quantum algorithms using sparse simulation
This blog post introduces the sparse simulator. Learn how it works and how it may help you with testing and debugging of quantum algorithms.