Sources and what was checked
How far to trust this
Anu separates what is known from what is proposed. Every concept and every hardware part carries one of five labels, and every source carries a note on how far it was checked.
Evidence labels
- Established
- A mathematical result or a well-defined, implemented technique. Its assumptions still apply.
- Experimental
- A reported hardware or simulation result for a specified task. Not universal superiority.
- Proposed
- A design choice recommended in the QNACA blueprint. Not implemented or measured.
- Speculative
- An open hypothesis with uncertain feasibility.
- Illustrative
- Numbers chosen to show a mechanism. Typical of the literature, not a measurement of one device.
What is exact, what is illustrative
- Exact. The concept labs run a statevector simulator in your browser. The transmon spectrum is a numerical diagonalisation. Thermal photon numbers and the attenuator chain are computed from the stated temperatures.
- Illustrative. The QPU is a generic tunable-coupler transmon design, not a specific commercial machine. Stage temperatures, cooling powers, attenuation values, qubit frequencies and coherence times are typical of the literature. Film thickness, airbridge height and the tunnel barrier are drawn larger than scale so they can be seen.
- Modelled. In the QNACA simulation, Max-Cut answers are computed for real; all timings, and the scheduling and spin-dynamics workloads, come from stated cost models. The error-correction curve uses a threshold of 1% and a prefactor of 0.1.
- Not built. QNACA is a proposal. The simulation shows the blueprint's design behaving as specified; it is not a measurement of a real system.
The QNACA blueprint
Project QNACA Research and Development Blueprint, 12 November 2026, 30 pages. It proposes a classical-first, verification-led adaptive runtime (Track A) and a separate research track on quantum-native learning (Track B). Page references across Anu point to this document.
References
checked: 7cited in blueprint: 9to verify: 15
checked
Opened and read while researching the QNACA blueprint.
- Quantum Portfolio Optimization: An Extensive Benchmark (2025)
- Comparing classical and quantum QUBO solvers (October 2026)
- Moussa, Calandra & Dunjko, To quantum or not to quantum (2020)
- IBM Quantum pay-as-you-go pricing, 2026 (via pricing aggregator)
- Los Alamos: barren-plateau-free quantum models are classically simulable (Nature Communications)
- Lindauer, Hoos & Hutter, From sequential algorithm selection to parallel portfolio selection (2015)
cited in blueprint
Taken from the blueprint's own reference list; not re-opened for Anu.
- Wootters & Zurek, A single quantum cannot be cloned, Nature 299 (1982)
- Preskill, Quantum Computing in the NISQ era and beyond, Quantum 2, 79 (2018)
- Acharya et al., Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold, Nature 638 (2025)
- Grover, A fast quantum mechanical algorithm for database search (1996)
- Shor, Polynomial-time algorithms for prime factorization and discrete logarithms (1997)
- Farhi, Goldstone & Gutmann, A Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (2014)
- Schuld et al., Evaluating analytic gradients on quantum hardware, PRA 99 (2019)
- McClean et al., Barren plateaus in quantum neural network training landscapes (2018)
- Xu, Hutter, Hoos & Leyton-Brown, SATzilla: portfolio-based algorithm selection, JAIR 32 (2008)
to verify
A standard reference, cited from memory. The paper exists; specific figures on the page that lean on it should be re-checked against it.
- Nielsen & Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information (2010)
- Bell, On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox, Physics 1 (1964)
- Clauser, Horne, Shimony & Holt, Proposed experiment to test local hidden-variable theories, PRL 23 (1969)
- Koch et al., Charge-insensitive qubit design derived from the Cooper pair box, PRA 76 (2007)
- Krantz et al., A quantum engineer's guide to superconducting qubits, Appl. Phys. Rev. 6 (2019)
- Blais, Grimsmo, Girvin & Wallraff, Circuit quantum electrodynamics, Rev. Mod. Phys. 93 (2021)
- Krinner et al., Engineering cryogenic setups for 100-qubit scale superconducting circuit systems, EPJ Quantum Technol. 6 (2019)
- Barends et al., Coherent Josephson qubit suitable for scalable quantum integrated circuits (Xmon), PRL 111 (2013)
- Arute et al., Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor, Nature 574 (2019)
- Macklin et al., A near-quantum-limited Josephson traveling-wave parametric amplifier, Science 350 (2015)
- Motzoi et al., Simple pulses for elimination of leakage in weakly nonlinear qubits (DRAG), PRL 103 (2009)
- Fowler et al., Surface codes: towards practical large-scale quantum computation, PRA 86 (2012)
- Pobell, Matter and Methods at Low Temperatures, 3rd ed. (2007)
- Josephson, Possible new effects in superconductive tunnelling, Phys. Lett. 1 (1962)
- Ambegaokar & Baratoff, Tunneling between superconductors, PRL 10 (1963)