Quantum News Nexus

IQM Quantum Computers continues to move closer to its merger with Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (RAAQ) and its public stock debut, as an “extraordinary general meeting” of RAAQ’s shareholders has been scheduled for June 25 to discuss the SPAC deal.

This latest step comes as IQM acknowledged that its registration statement on Form F-4 regarding the business combination had been declared effective by the SEC. Assuming the deal eventually closes, IQM will trade under the symbol “IQMX” on Nasdaq. Quantum stocks mostly have been down amid broader market panic lately. Quantinuum (NSDQ: QNT) was the most recent sector stock to debut, and as of Wednesday afternoon was down about 6.4% to $51.42 from last week’s IPO price of $60.

Speaking of Quantinuum, its IPO made a billionaire out of company exec and Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) founder Illyas Khan, according to Quantum Zeitgeist. Longtime quantum fans will remember that CQC was one of the most highly regarded quantum technology companies around before a merger announced in November 2021 brought Honeywell’s quantum computing hardware and CQC’s software together to form Quantinuum. 

The minting of quantum billionaires has not quite caught up with the minting of AI billionaires, but before Khan, Xanadu Quantum Technologies founder Christian Weedbrook was the most recent quantum founder to attain that status through his firm’s public stock trading debut. As more quantum SPAC mergers and IPOs are added to the calendar, the pace will only pick up.

Sticking with the theme of remembering some past companies, Australian firm Cryoclock was one of the first companies I heard of–around 2018–that was developing atomic clocks. At some point not long after, the company changed its name to QuantX Labs, and just this week announced seed funding of $5 million USD (about $7 million AUS). Companies such as Infleqtion and IonQ have been getting more notice about the use of quantum sensing for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) in space and other markets, but QuantX Labs back in April saw its own timing subsystem launched into orbit.

NuQuantum has new (not “nu”) research on how multi-node, distributed quantum computing networks can survive the un planned outage of a single quantum processor. NuQuantum stated in its press release that “quantum information encoded across the entire network rather than on a single-QPU, catastrophic node failure can become a correctable error. Information encoded across the wider network can still be recovered, so long as the failed node holds only a small fraction of the total error correction code.” This finding could help quantum network designers as they plan new, larger-scale networks that go beyond the limited scope of many quantum networks today. It also could help network operators as they plan for eventual necessary outages due to network maintenance or upgrades.

Image source: IQM

Quantum News Nexus is a site from freelance writer and editor Dan O’Shea that covers quantum computing, quantum sensing, quantum networking, quantum-safe security, and more. You can find him on X @QuantumNewsGuy and doshea14@gmail.com.