Ah! Summer grasses! All that remains Of the warriors dreams Matsuo Bash

In the summer of 1889, Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki brought baseball to his hometown. He started with a ball, a bat and a few friends. It had been 17 years since the American professor Horace Wilson began teaching the sport to students in Tokyo. Shiki was a college student, a member of the first generation of Japanese ballplayers. He soon became famous for something else: reviving the old poetry tradition of haiku.

In simple terms, Shiki was an iconoclast, a critic, an ambitious writer who pulled from Western influences, challenged convention, pushed limits and reinvented haiku in the process. He was also a baseball player, one who loved to pitch and play catcher, who became so obsessed with the sport that he began to write poetry about it. Today he is considered one of Japans four great haiku masters. Hes also in the Japanese baseball hall of fame. He elevated two art forms by thrusting them forward.

Before Shiki died at age 34, he devoted much of his energy into examining the first haiku master, Matsuo Bash, a 17th-century poet recognized as Japans greatest. Like many Japanese writers, Shiki read Bashs masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a travelogue of his journey into the remote wilderness of northeast Japan in the late 1600s. Its a legendary piece of Japanese literature, a work that later inspired the Beat Generation. Bash traveled on foot. The trip took five months. Along the way, he ventured to the town of Hiraizumi, in what is now Iwate Prefecture, still a rural area in the north.

If you travel to Iwate today, you will find statues of Bash, tributes to his journey and inscriptions of his haikus. But if you stay a while, you will also find baseball.

Its where Shohei Ohtani grew up.

On April 26, Shohei Ohtani did something that no one had done in a century: He stepped on a pitchers mound and started a game for the Angels while leading the American League in homers. Ohtani was the first to accomplish this since Babe Ruth, who pulled it off for the last time on June 13, 1921, but as always with Ohtani, the fine print was more fascinating than the headline. The day before, on April 25, he put a baseball into orbit in Houston, launching a 440-foot homer at Minute Maid Park. The day before that,he homered while making his first cameo in left field. And the dayafterhis start, he was back in the lineup at designated hitter.

But on the day he started? That was light work. He collected two hits, drove in two runs, scored three times, lasted five innings on the mound, struck out out nine and earned the win, which made him the first pitcher in either league to have two hits, three runs and nine strikeouts since Luis Tiant in 1967. A pretty complete game of baseball, Angels manager Joe Maddon said, a statement which was both technically correct and underscored the difficulty of capturing the Ohtani experience with words.

One hundred and forty years after Horace Wilson brought baseball to Japan, 131 years after Masaoka Shiki crafted his first poetic tribute, and a hundred years (give or take) after Ruth cemented the game as Americas pastime, Ohtani, a 26-year-old from Iwate Prefecture, is threatening to break the sport, to push the limits of what was thought possible, to redefine our conception of a baseball star. This is at once obvious to the baseball layman and also hard to fully grip. Ohtani is 6 feet 4, and he looks as if his bodily proportions were designed for blueprints in a baseball laboratory. His frame could fit in a Terminator movie. He throws 101 mph and he hits 470-foot homers, sometimes on the same night. And after three seasons in America, after Tommy John surgery and a pandemic slowed his ascent, he is finally showing the skill set that made him the most tantalizing baseball prospect on earth.

If he is not the most valuable player in the sport, he is no doubt the most gifted. If he were just a hitter or just a pitcher, he would still be an All-Star candidate and a hero in his home country. But he is both, a composite sketch of the sports great players, a borrower of styles, a surrealists idea of a baseball player, a starting pitcher with a 2.58 ERA in 11 starts and a designated hitter with 28 homers and an OPS+ north of 170. He is a cartoon character out of Japanese anime. He is the big kid from Little League. He is ruthlessly efficient with his body, at once mechanically sound and graceful, wielding a bat as if Bryce Harper grew up worshiping the elegance of Ichiro Suzuki.

Justin Upton, a teammate on the Angels who has spent five seasons playing with Mike Trout, has deemed Ohtani the most talented player Ive ever seen. Mets starter Marcus Stroman called him a mythical legend in human form, while Kevin Durant stopped a torrid NBA playoff run to weigh in. Different breed, he tweeted. Leury Garca, a White Sox utility player who watched Ohtani terrorize his club in April, offered more subtle praise: Oh, he nasty.

Rick Ankiel, one of the few men in recorded history who has made the major leagues as a pitcher and a hitter (though, notably, not at the same time) describes Ohtani as being in his own world, as far as ability. Joe Maddon, his manager, notes day after day: Nobody has ever done this before.

Ohtani is the type of player who strains the imagination and inspires wonder among his fellow players. He also raises philosophical questions about the future of his sport: Is he the first of a new and rare superstar archetype (once in a generation, perhaps?)? Or, is he a unicorn? Is he the latest master in a proud Japanese baseball tradition based on endless training and self-sacrifice? Or, is he reinventing the form? And, finally, there is a question for us, the audience:

Is it possible to properly appreciate something weve never seen before?

Before Shohei Ohtani came along, the last Japanese professional player to be an All-Star as a pitcher and hitter was Junzo Sekine. He was a wisp of a human, 5 feet 7 and 130 pounds, an avatar for many Japanese players of his day. In the spring of 1966, he traveled to the United States and spent a month with the Yankees at spring training. He wanted to learn a new culture.

Sekine had started his career as a pitcher for the Kintetsu Pearls (later the Buffaloes) in 1950. He spent seven seasons on the mound, transitioned to first base, and became something like the Rick Ankiel of 1950s Japan. He was solid at both roles, fundamentally sound and productive, but it was his versatility that impressed. When his career ended, he dreamed of managing, so he sought knowledge from the best baseball franchise in the world, the club that had produced Babe Ruth, the original two-way standard.

When compared to its American counterpart, Japanese baseball remains a culture unto itself, a thriving system with its own history, traditions and beauty, a sport that did not change the locals so much as bent to their will. When the game first arrived in the late 1800s, the Japanese had no concept of recreational leisure sports. They didnt even have words to describe them. Every thing was a martial art, says Robert Whiting, a Tokyo-based author who has chronicled Japanese baseball for decades.

Japanese baseball, then, came to be influenced bybushid, the moral code of honor developed by the samurai warrior class. As it spread, the sport grew as a tool for education. It was regimented and militaristic, a game that taught lessons in suffering and sacrifice, a reflection of the society it had charmed. A century later, as Ohtani came of age in Iwate, the old influences remained softened, of course, by modern advances and progressive attitudes but still vital to the endeavor.

Sekine had grown up in that culture in the 1930s and 40s, immersed in the philosophy of unending practice daily training, thousands of swings, hundreds of pitches during one bullpen session. Still, there was one thing in common with the major leagues: nobody dared to pitch andhit at the same time.

This was mostly because of the hellish demands on pitchers. In the 1950s and 60s, Japanese hurlers undertook extraordinary workloads, even by the standards of the day. Hiroshi Gondo, a pitcher for Chunichi, threw a record 429 innings in 1961, inspiring the Japanese version of Spahn and Sain and pray for rain. (It included more rain and more Gondo.) As Whiting says, The pitchers threw so much that it was unrealistic to expect them to do anything else.

The Japanese adored Babe Ruth. He had visited the country during a goodwill tour in 1934. The locals packed stadiums and shouted Banzai Babe Ruth! But they did not have an analog for him; there were no two-way legends who transcended the sport. Of course, if the Japanese would have studied Ruths career, they would have noted that even the Babe found playing both ways to be a hindrance. Ruth managed to log double duty for parts of only two seasons with the Red Sox, in 1918 and 1919 (with some later mound cameos for the Yankees). Waite Hoyt, a teammate in Boston and New York, would call Ruths 1919 season the year of the Great Experiment. Newspapers debated his role. The year before, Ruth had expressed doubts that anyone could do both.

I dont think a man can pitch in his regular turn, and play every other game at some other position, and keep that pace year after year, Ruth told the writer F.C. Lane of Baseball Magazine in late 1918. I can do it this season all right, and not feel it, for I am young and strong and dont mind the work. But I wouldnt guarantee to do it for many seasons.

Ruth was sold to the Yankees before the 1920 season and became a full-time slugger. And for the next hundred years, his prophecy largely proved true. (There were a collection of two-way stars in the Negro Leagues, including Charles Wilber Bullet Rogan and Ted Double Duty Radcliffe.)

Baseball evolved. Specialization reigned. The game grew on both sides of the Pacific. Hideo Nomo arrived stateside. The Japanese pipeline opened. Ichiro Suzuki started a revolution. The best kids in Japan came of age thinking about the major leagues. Then one day in the early 2010s, an executive from an American League team traveled to watch a high school star named Shohei Ohtani compete in Koshien, the countrys legendary national high school baseball tournament. Koshien is March Madness plus Friday Night Lights times 10. Ohtani was tall and lean and he threw 99 mph. He told reporters that he wanted to bypass the Japanese professional league Nippon Professional Baseball and head to America.

In the mind of the scout, Ohtani was one of the best Japanese pitching prospects in years. Like most high school stars, he was also a position player with intriguing bat speed and power. But the scout believed his future was on the mound.

I didnt think of him doing both, he says.

Then again, why would he? Nobody had tried in a century. Was it even possible? At least one person believed it was: Ohtani.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then the genuine fear of losing a homegrown prodigy to the United States helped birth Ohtani as a two-way player. The Nippon-Ham Fighters, one of the savviest organizations in Japanese baseball, had a plan. First, they would show Ohtani an unvarnished look at life as a minor leaguer. Then, they would convince him that he could do both. He didnt need to choose. Ohtani imagined a career without limits, his potential dictated only by his level of devotion and work. Soon, the scout returned to Japan for another trip and watched Ohtani take batting practice. He came away with one thought:

This guy is a f hitter.

On April 4, the fourth day of the 2021 baseball season, Shohei Ohtani was a hitter. He was also a pitcher. In the top of the first, he faced the Chicago White Sox and hurled a fastball 101 mph. In the bottom half, he stepped to the plate, loaded his hands, uncoiled his hips and unleashed his barrel on a belt-high fastball. The crack sounded like a bomb, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to a tone block or tossed a rocking chair off a roof. (If you watch the replay once, theres a 100 percent chance you will watch it again.) The baseball soared 451 feet into the night sky. Ohtani, the first pitcher to bat second in the lineup since 1903, looked almost princely as he circled the bases.

Lefty Gomez once described Ruths homers as homing pigeons. The famous Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh produced a beautiful crack withhandmadetamo-wood bats. And the legendary scout Buck ONeil once said that only Ruth, Josh Gibson and Bo Jackson could generate a sound likethat.But there remains something different about the sound that emanates from Ohtanis bat. For one, it is loud. It is also perfectly toned, the crack of the kind of textured percussion that usually demands headphones. And on the night of April 4, it was so loud that some viewers assumed it must have been enhanced by ESPNs Sunday Night Baseball broadcast.

Phil Orlins, ESPNs lead producer for its MLB coverage, assures that it was not. The sound was natural. As Ohtani swung at a high fastball from the White Soxs Dylan Cease, the high-speed collision of ball and bat was picked up by four wireless mics buried in front of home plate at Angel Stadium. It was then transmitted to a production truck, added to the broadcasts sound mix, and sent out to viewers across the country. Exactly the way it sounds if youre standing by the batting cage during BP, Orlins says.

Ohtani, of course, tends toward the maximal. When Brad Ausmus managed the Angels during the 2019 season, hed tell people to arrive early to watch Ohtani hit batting practice. It wasnt just the sound, and it wasnt just the distance, though Ohtani often put balls into the far reaches of Angel Stadium. It was the height. His power seems to have tremendous upward trajectory, almost like Darryl Strawberry, Ausmus says. He hits the ball 200 feet straight up in the air, and it goes 450 feet out.

Ohtani showed glimpses of this power as a rookie in 2018, hitting 22 homers while making 82 starts at DH, and again in 2019, as he recovered from Tommy John surgery and was limited to hitting. But after struggling in the shortened 2020 season (Ohtani called his own play pathetic), he is becoming the hitter that Ausmus saw, a technical marvel of leverage and energy transfer.

To watch Ohtani swing a bat is to see a hitter who has mastered the two most important elements of the craft: technical expertise and creative genius the science and the art. Ohtani has what master swordsmen call edge alignment, the ability to guide his weapon to the baseball at the ideal angle to maximize power and distance. He also has the ability to improvise.

Ausmus began his career playing with Tony Gwynn in San Diego and finished it playing alongside Manny Ramirez with the Dodgers. Gwynn was a modern-day Ted Williams, a man who understood the mechanics of the swing better than anyone of his generation. Ramirez was a physical virtuoso; hitting was his craft. Ohtani, Ausmus says, is somehow both at once.

When Ohtani was a rookie, Albert Pujols would watch his young teammate smash balls over the center-field batters eye, then pass along bullish scouting reports to Ankiel, his former teammate with the Cardinals. (Is it real? Ankiel remembers asking. Its everything and more, Pujols said.) Four years later, Ohtani is on pace to hit 57 homers after smashing three more in two days at Yankee Stadium. His latest power binge included a 117.2-mph blast on Monday the hardest homer of his career and 20 of his 28 homers have been struck with an exit velocity of more than 105 mph and a launch angle above 20 degrees. He leads the majors in that category, meaning nobody combines distance and height quite like Ohtani.

Its majestic, Ausmus says.

Its Ruthian.

When Ohtani was a boy in Iwate, he idolized Ichiro Suzuki and attempted to emulate him. When he joined the Nippon-Ham Fighters in 2013, he studied video of Bryce Harper, which indirectly meant he was studying the swing of Ruth, who had borrowed from Shoeless Joe Jackson and spurred the original launch-angle revolution. The connection between Ruth and Harper was drawn in 2013, when, according to the Washington Post, then-Nationals hitting coach Rick Schu studied footage of both players side by side. Identical, he told the newspaper.

To watch Ohtani is to see the same foundation the stiff front leg, the hands loading and the hips unwinding, the back foot lifting off the ground. He is not a perfect copy of Harper; duringspring training in 2018, Ohtani visited Ichiro, who suggested he lose the big leg kick he developed in Japan. He replaced it with a simple toe tap.

Ohtani has always been a blender of styles. When he was a teenage rookie with the Fighters, he peppered veteran pitcher Bobby Keppel with questions about the United States, culling information about major-league competition and the craft of pitching. When former Marlins outfielder Jeremy Hermida arrived in 2015, Ohtani quizzed him about the culture of the big leagues, the stadiums, the logistics, the lifestyle. You could tell in his mind, he had a goal, Keppel says.

The Fighters employed an interpreter and liaison for its American players. Ippei Mizuhara had grown up in Southern California and spent his childhood near Angel Stadium. For Ohtani, he offered a window to American baseball, a go-between who translated conversations with the former major leaguers on the roster. (When Ohtani chose the Angels, Mizuhara came with him.) Keppel remembered Ohtani as very polite and reserved. He was a teenager who took the time to learn Spanish phrases to connect with the Cuban players on the Fighters roster. Michael Crotta, another former major-league pitcher, likened his young teammate to Paul Bunyan. Hermida would watch bullpen sessions and batting practice and sum up the experience like this: The most natural juice Ive ever seen.

It was easy to see where Ohtani was headed. In 2016, his fourth season with the Fighters, he hit .322 with 22 homers in 382 plate appearances while posting a 1.86 ERA in 140 innings. It was more impressive to see the path he took. He was a machine, Crotta says. Before the game, he would throw a 100-pitch bullpen and jump right into a grueling, eight-minute batting practice. (In Japan, BP is timed, not based on swings.) In pregame pitchers meetings, Ohtani would sit with Crotta and Luis Mendoza, another former big leaguer, and offer the notes hed taken on each opposing hitter.

He was not afraid to speak about what he was doing or how he found success or where he struggled, Crotta says. At 18, I dont know if I would have had the stones to stand up in front of a bunch of guys and tell them how I felt about stuff.

Ohtanis studiousness his habit of taking notes and writing things down had been honed in high school, when he starred at Hanamaki Higashi High School in Iwate. Hanamaki Higashi is not a natural hotbed for baseball superstars. By Japanese standards, its considered somewhat rural, located 300 miles north of Tokyo and away from the countrys biggest population centers. The winters are harsh. When Ohtani was at the school, the baseball program led by coach Hiroshi Sasaki reflected the discipline and ideals of the old ways. Players lived in dorms and were assigned a list of chores. Training was intense.

Sasaki, however, also focused on individual growth and progressive training tools. One example: The pitchers used a swimming program to build strength and flexibility. Another: Sasaki adopted the Harada Method, a self-improvement technique, asking his players to write down their goals and list strategies to achieve them, to envision next week, next month, and where they wanted to be at age 25 or 30.

He just has a philosophy of how to coach and how to teach young boys about life, says Ema Ryan Yamazaki, a filmmaker who followed the Hanamaki Higashi program for one season in 2018 for a documentary about Koshien.

As a sophomore in high school, Ohtani set a goal to throw 99 mph (160 kilometers per hour) and sketched out a road map to get there. (According to a copy of Ohtanis high school goals obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Ohtani wrote of having a cool head and hot passion. One strategy was more straightforward: Read books.) He brought his inquisitiveness to professional baseball, where he focused on self improvement, day by day, and crafted another plan to better himself. He was a pitcher and a hitter, and he would do both until he couldnt anymore. He did everything he could to make that plan come true, Crotta says.

By 2015, Ohtani was the Fighters best starter and a part-time position player whose talent was apparent. He was also just 20, which meant he still dressed in the secondary locker room, a small nook adjacent to the weight room, where the youngest players were stuck until they gained more experience.

He just never complained, Hermida says. Never nothing. He couldnt have been more humble, more nice, smile on his face every day.

Baseball was his life, and he ate, slept, breathed baseball. Everything about it was training. How can I get better? How can I do better?

Its possible that no player in baseball was more prepared for a quarantine. When Ohtani was with the Fighters, he lived in a spartan dormitory in Hokkaido. After joining the Angels, he moved into an apartment complex across the parking lot from the stadium. There are many ways to analyze Ohtanis insistence on efficiency and convenience, but one thing is clear: The man does not require much space. Former Angels general manager Billy Eppler once compared a younger Ohtani to Ivan Drago, the shredded Russian villain from Rocky IV, which seemed less about his physical prowess and more about his single-minded focus toward training. If Ohtani has built a brand around his talent and in Japan, its an astonishingly large brand it is one built on a simple tenet: A wholesome commitment to baseball with all his being.

He wants to be the greatest baseball player ever, Ausmus said. So he does everything he can to try and achieve that goal.

Ohtanis stoicism extends to his movement patterns or lack thereof. There is no shortage of social avenues in nearby Los Angeles. He waited until 2020 to get his drivers license. His temperament also colors his interviews. On June 8, Ohtani hit his 17th homer, a 470-foot moonshot against the Royals in Anaheim. His response to the Japanese press corps: Im glad I was able to start things on a good note with a home run.

When Ohtani debuted in 2018, reporters mined for illustrative anecdotes. They have mostly come up empty. The list of revelations includes this: Ohtani turned to video games as a way to bond with teammates. He sang a passable version of Despacito on the team bus. He took to cooking, setting a routine that was as exciting as his regimented training: One omelet, every morning. (As Ohtani told the Kyodo News in 2018, he also found virtue in solitude. You can eat quickly when you eat alone, he said.)

Whiting, whose seminal book, You Gotta Have Wa, explores the relationship between baseball and Japanese society, has described Ohtani as a baseballing monk, a happy warrior who smiles while being checked for sticky stuff. In this way, he is something close to the ideal Japanese player, a purist whose adherence to tradition causes you to see the sport in an entirely different fashion. He represents everything thats good about the Japanese approach to baseball, Whiting says.

Ohtani is so famous in Japan that earlier this season the Royals (and a few other teams) sold in-stadium signage to Nishikawa Co., a bedding company that is touting its 455th (!) anniversary. To explain his presence in Japanese culture, Yamazaki reaches into another phenomenon, the world of Japanese comics, otherwise known as manga. Hes one of those people that could be out of those stories, she says.

Yamazaki is currently filming a project in a Tokyo elementary school, where Ohtani Angels T-shirts are the unofficial school uniform. But to understand the love affair, you have to understand what Ohtani is not. He is not Ichiro, an outfielder with a dancers build, who conjured a style out of speed, contact and otherworldly coordination. He is not solely a dominant pitcher in the mold of Nomo, Masahiro Tanaka or Yu Darvish. He is everything, all at once, a physical marvel and a thinking man, a supreme talent and a grunt worker, a pitcher and a hitter, and it is no small thing that he is often one of the biggest players on the field.

I think thats a huge source of pride for Japanese people as well, she says. Hes kind of like an American version of a Japanese player.

The young grass kids get together To hit a ball

Masaoka Shiki

On June 16, in the hours after Ohtani homered for a second straight night in Oakland, Angels manager Joe Maddon found his star on the flight home. Ohtani was set to pitch against the Tigers the next night. Maddon wanted to make sure he felt good enough to hit.

Ohtani said yes. His legs felt good. The next day, he allowed one run in six innings while drawing two walks himself. He then returned to the lineup the next day and hit two more homers, which started another Ohtani Stretch, a sequence of baseball that, in any other era in the last 100 years, would have sounded made up. Ohtani homered again in the final two games of the four-game series against the Tigers, which gave him six homers in a six-game stretch, the only non-homer game coming as he lowered his ERA to 2.70. (In a previous Ohtani Stretch, earlier in June, he became the first player in the modern era to strike out 10 batters and the next day hit a homer in the first inning.) Every day, Ohtani does something that feels like it might break the coding system at Baseball-Reference. Every day, Maddon is having conversations that no American League manager has had in 100 years. This is a unique athlete, and none of us have been there before, Maddon says.

When Ohtani was a rookie, the Angels outlined a schedule that roughly approximated his workload in Japan, where he threw once a week and often took days off before and after his starting pitching assignments. Now those rules are gone. Ohtani is playing nearly every day and letting his body dictate the rest. Maddon has no preconceived notions on what is too much or too little Its observational and conversational, he says and there are no metrics or numbers to use as guideposts. I dont really think theres a math equation thats going to tell us when its the right time to use him, Maddon added.

Still, Maddon has exercised caution at times, because Ohtani is doing something thats never been done, and there is no roadmap or script to follow. When the Angels have played in National League parks, Ohtani has sat, because thats what a designated hitter would do. When Ohtani exited after six innings and 78 pitches against the Tigers on June 16, Maddon put the decision in a grander context.

Its still June, he said, and I want this guy to have one of the greatest seasons ever.

If you combined his contributions on both sides of the ball and his underrated speed Ohtani leads all major leaguers with 5.7 Wins Above Replacement, according to Baseball-Reference. He is slugging nearly .700 while opposing hitters slug just .314 against him. Absent Mike Trout, who remains out with a calf strain, he has kept his team on the far fringes of wild-card contention though Angels fans know better than anyone the limits of one brilliant superstar across 162 games.

When the Angels played in Kansas City in April, Royals catcher Salvador Prez teased Trout about his long reign as the best player in the world, which suddenly seemed in peril. Now its maybe 50-50, Perez said. Because now youve got Ohtani. The debates about the MVP award or Ohtanis value as a two-way player tend to miss an important point. Ohtani is not just measuring himself against Trout or Vladimir Guerrero Jr. or Jacob deGrom or anyone else with a valid case as the best player in baseball. Hes battling 100 years of baseball dogma. When Rick Ankiel was a young pitcher, before he flamed out and revived his career as a slugging outfielder, he once asked Cardinals manager Tony La Russa if he could get some playing time in the field. Were still trying to win, La Russa said. You know that, right?

Of course, there have always been players like Ankiel, pitchers who could hit, or hitters with great arms, players like John Olerud and Dave Winfield and Ken Brett and all the way back to Stan Musial, who signed his first professional contract as a pitcher, to Junzo Sekine, who willed himself to be a solid hitter when he could no longer pitch. There will be more, too, and it seems possible that Ohtani has changed the game, that teams will be more open to accommodating phenoms, that the demands on pitchers are less, that we will see more two-way players in the not-so-distant future. Shohei has opened the doors to do both, Ausmus says. But youre going to have look 10 years down the road.

Or maybe longer.

Once in 50 years, another general manager said.

To do what Ohtani is doing requires something more than sheer athletic talent. It requires more than an arm that can throw 100 mph and a swing that can launch baseballs 450 feet. It requires a player who will embrace the struggle, who craves the suffering that accompanies the work, who enjoys the solitude of a night alone, who keeps binders full of notes and asks questions and commits himself to baseball with all his being, who in the words of former Angels GM Billy Eppler has one thing on his mind.

He wants mastery, he once said, and hes going to stop at nothing.

In the end, in this moment and the next, there is only one Shohei Ohtani.

The Athletics Fabian Ardaya and Andy McCullough contributed to this report.

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic / Getty Images)

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Shohei Ohtani is 'in his own world' ... which appears to be somewhere beyond baseball's outer limits - The Athletic

GDP per persons average annual growth is projected to fall only from 1.6 per cent over the past 40 years to 1.5 per cent over the coming 40.

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Its here, however, that business and its media cheer squad have read the fine print and are deeply sceptical: that projection of GDP growth per person rests heavily on the mere assumption that the productivity of labour (output of goods and services per hour worked) will improve at the same average annual rate in the coming 40 years as it did over the past 30 years.

And theyre right. Of all the many assumptions on which the reports mechanical projections depend, this assumption is far the most critical. As Frydenberg rightly says, improving productivity is what explains almost all the improvement in our standard of living over the decades.

And the sceptics are right to doubt that productivity will improve over the next 40 years at anything like the rate of 1.5 per cent a year. For a start, that 30-year average includes the 1990s, a decade when productivity improved at a rate far higher than experienced before or since.

For another thing, productivity improvement in recent years has been much weaker than usual.

So, purely by omission, the latest intergenerational report reminds us of the second biggest threat to our living standards: a continuing slump in productivity. (The biggest threat is the worlds inadequate response to climate change another thing the report omits to take into account.)

Whats discouraging, however, is the way the business lobby groups have used this inadvertent reminder to bang the same old self-serving drum. The productivity slump has been caused by this government and its predecessors failure to continue the economic reform program begun by Hawke, Keating and Howard, were assured.

And what reforms do they have in mind? A cut in the rate of company tax for big business and changes in the wage-fixing rules to make the labour market more flexible for employers.

This lobbying is objectionable on three grounds. First, it implies that productivity improvement depends on an unending stream of changes in government policies, which is absurd. The day reform stops, productivity stops.

Second, it shifts the blame for weak productivity improvement from the actions of the private sector in whose farms, mines, factories, offices and shops productivity either gets better or worse to the politicians in Canberra.

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Third, it seeks to disguise blatant rent-seeking as economic reform. Productivity would improve if business owners and high income-earners paid less tax, leaving the punters to pay more, and if the balance of bargaining power between bosses and workers shifted further in favour of bosses.

What this self-serving bulldust ignores is that productivity improvement has slumped in all the rich countries, not just in Australia because our pollies are so defective.

Michael Brennan, chair of the Productivity Commission, says the worlds economists are still debating the causes of the productivity slowdown. Theyve pointed to mismeasurement issues, a shift towards lower productivity industries, population ageing, a slowdown in the pace of technological discovery, a slowdown in the pace of technological diffusion, a plateauing of improvements in human capital, reduced rates of firm entry and exit, increased concentration and market power, lower capital investment, a shift to intangible capital and the slowing growth in global trade.

As Melinda Cilento of CEDA, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, has noted, research by federal Treasury . . . showed leading Australian firms were not keeping up with leading global firms on productivity.

Treasury would be much better employed continuing to research the causes of our productivity slump than doing literally unbelievable projections of whats unlikely to happen over the next 40 years.

Ross Gittins is the economics editor.

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Business resorts to same old productivity bulldust - Sydney Morning Herald

Like an otaku making snap judgements about a gyaru girl, it can be easy to go into Guide to the Perfect Otaku Girlfriend: Roomies and Romance Volume thinking you know what to expect. These fixer-upper fantasies about a cute girl coming into your life to help teach you how to pick up girls have been increasing in frequency for the fanboy set, letting authors play with meta-humor and genre awareness as a self-involved selling point. The book even opens with a bit dedicated to that, starting with a scene of wifely otaku wish-fulfillment that quickly derails into an amusing detailing of how annoyingly stressful it would actually be to have too many of those taped-together tropes all at once. It sets the book up to depict something of a balancing act: Recognizing the real-world expectations one should have in trying to date someone with your own interests while also still providing enough fantasy fanservice to function as an otaku-targeted work of fiction. The result mostly works out okay, and even entertains with a couple of surprising angles, but it also takes a while to get there.

The most immediately odd factor about Perfect Otaku Girlfriend was the relationship between its two primary characters. I hesitate to refer to what Kagetora and Kokoro have at this point as chemistry; instead, the writing really does a strong job of depicting the annoyance that can follow in trying to get on with someone you share interests with but otherwise have absolutely nothing else in common. Basically, you know how in romantic comedies the lead couple-to-be will often verbally spar with each other but still come across like they have a rapport to the point that you still want to see them get together? Kagetora and Kokoro's constant arguing, undermining, and negging of each other left me absolutely not wanting to see them coupled. And to the story's credit, by the end of this first volume, author Rin Murakami really hasn't gestured too hard in that direction as the pair's ultimate destination. Instead, the arc between the two really feels more like one of growing mutual respect and understanding in spite of their constant barbs and bickering, arriving at the idea of being comrades in their ongoing efforts to help each other find dates.

There's still some push and pull regarding the question of attraction, mostly on account of Kagetora being our point-of-view character and him fighting with his inner monologue throughout the volume over how actually attracted to Kokoro he is at any given moment. These kinds of segments mostly seem to exist to illustrate the gap in taste preference between the typical male otaku of Kagetora (and thus, I suspect, the author) versus the actual style and personality Kokoro tends to put on, breaking the illusions of the various cosplay fantasy scenes she otherwise indulges in. Some of Kagetora's outspoken reactions to these scene breaks can come off abrasive, especially if you're not sympathetic to the fanboy mindset he's embodying with them, but our main character at least never comes off as terribly toxic as some of the other leads seen in similar works. He is, at worst, just something of a cringey otaku guy who does find himself more willing to learn as the story goes on, punctuated well by him regularly having to admit whenever Kokoro's right in one of her judgements or self-improvement suggestions for him, regardless of the sharp-tongued way in which she delivers it.

The characters' arcs as they work towards successfully seeking out their theoretical ideal otaku dates represent the main story Perfect Otaku Girlfriend is relating, so a lot of the mechanical plot details worked through as we get there can feel purely incidental. The largest swath of the beginning of this first volume is focused on getting to the main plot contrivance: Kagetora and Kokoro living under one roof with no parental supervision, rolling via a procession of sudden family relocations and fake-dating plots. After that, the story starts filling time with an oddly aggressive quantity of scenes of Kokoro cosplaying, or pointedly ill-fated tangential dating schemes, like Kagetora and Kokoro's pursuit of potential partners through an MMO that ends on a limp, expected punchline. Other aspects introduced are one-offs that feel equally like threads to be picked up in later volumes, or pure fanservice fantasy for the Kagetoras reading along at home, such as discovering that one of your school-mates is not only the most popular new V-tuber, but also a huge otaku just like you! That's part and parcel to the kind of genre and story this book exists in service of, but just going off this first volume, it feels like a lot of fluff and dead ends that detracts from the more compelling components of the contrasting otaku tastes of the leads and how their connection lets them communicate advice to one another.

As the actual finding dates plot picks up more in the second half of the book, Perfect Otaku Girlfriend's strengths come through better in its energy. Barbed as their dialogue may be, there is a sense that Kagetora and Kokoro genuinely have their comrade's best interests in mind in the tastes they instruct each other to cater to. And for a series like this, it's nice to see some genuine advice provided to an audience-cipher like Kagetora on the simple ways one can take care of themself in terms of making yourself more appealing and presentable than you might give yourself credit for. The idea that the pair aren't terribly compatible as potential date-partners at this point interestingly makes their efforts at assisting each other more believable and compelling. And seeing the growth of that mutual respect over the course of them helping each other, to the point that Kagetora is able to do the right thing and prematurely end his own date with what seems to be his dream girl because he knows Kokoro needs his help, is a heartening hurdle for the pair to make it over by the end. As with most good dating advice self-help stories, showing characters' growth as people is the main key to communicate for them, apart from simply becoming more appealing as a potential partner.

Rin Murakami's writing of all of this is pretty effectively communicative, not being as focused on trying to be purely dialogue-driven or overtly comic-like as other light novels I've read. The prose is descriptive without getting too bogged down in detailing a lot of the otaku-appeal touches throughout, though there are plenty of direct and obscured references to well-known franchises, as well as something of an over-reliance on the same snippets of current subculture slang (get ready to read the phrase Virgin-Killer dozens of times in a row). It all mostly works out fine, presented by an English translation that lends the right amount of flavor, especially in the distinctive dialogue between characters. It's supplemented by a few page illustrations by Mako Tatekawa which look nice enough, but seem less about providing visuals for key moments in the story, and more about just showing us what each character introduced looks like.

Guide to the Perfect Otaku Girlfriend is an indulgent book that knows the main niche it's trying to appeal to, but is inoffensive in its execution thereof that regular readers can have a fair bit of fun with it if they let themselves. It does take a bit to get going, and there are times when the ways the leads butt heads can come off as too abrasive, but in some ways, that feels like the storytelling learning and growing along with its characters. There's enough development and hooks in this volume to leave me interested in where the story would go in the future. I'd count that as a success, especially after I spent so much time at the beginning wondering when the book was going to chill out on the cosplaying and video games and actually get on with it.

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Guide to the Perfect Otaku Girlfriend: Roomies and Romance Volume 1 - Anime News Network

Rigetti launched the multi-chip device with the objective of reaching 80 qubits later this year, up from the current 31 qubits supported by the company's Aspen processor.

Finding out how to pack as many high-quality qubits as possible on a single quantum processor is a challenge that still keeps most researchers scratching their heads but now quantum startup Rigetti Computing has come up with a radically new approach to the problem.

Instead of focusing on increasing the size of a single quantum processor,Rigetti has linked up various smaller chips together to create, instead, a modular processor that still has a higher overall qubit count.

Describing the technology as the world's "first multi-chip quantum processor", the company launched the device with the objective of reaching 80 qubits later this year, up from the current 31 qubits supported by its Aspen processor.

SEE: Building the bionic brain (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

By that time, the new quantum system will be available for Rigetti customers to use over the firm's Quantum Cloud Services platform.

"We've developed a fundamentally new approach to scaling quantum computers," said Chad Rigetti, the founder of Rigetti Computing. "Our proprietary innovations in chip design and manufacturing have unlocked what we believe is the fastest path to building the systems needed to run practical applications and error correction."

Like IBM and Google, Rigetti's quantum systems are based on superconducting qubits, which are mounted in arrays on a processor where they are coupled and controlled thanks to microwave pulses. Qubits are also connected to a resonator and associated wiring, which enables the system to encode, manipulate and read out quantum information.

Qubits come with special quantum properties that are expected to lend quantum computers unprecedented computational power. But for that to happen, processors will need to pack a significant number of qubits far more than they currently do.

For quantum computers to start generating very early value, experts anticipate that at least 1,000 qubits will be necessary; and a million qubits is often cited as the threshold for most useful applications. In contrast, the most powerful quantum processors currently support less than 100 qubits.

Scaling up the number of qubits sitting on a single processor, however, is difficult. This is mostly due to the fragility of qubits, which need to be kept in ultra-protected environments that are colder than outer space to ensure that they remain in their quantum state. More qubits on a chip, therefore, inevitably mean more potential for failure and lower manufacturing yields.

Instead, Rigetti proposes to connect several identical processors, such as those that the company is already capable of reliably manufacturing, into a large-scale quantum processor.

"This modular approach exponentially reduces manufacturing complexity and allows for accelerated, predictable scaling," said the company.

According to Rigetti, this will also enable future systems to scale in multiplicative ways, as individual chips increase their number of qubits, and new technologies enable more of these chips to be connected into larger processors.

With scale being a top priority for virtually every organization in the quantum ecosystem, Rigetti's new launch could well give the startup a competitive advantage, even in an industry crowded with tech giants the likes of Google, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon.

IBM recently unveiled a roadmap for its quantum hardware thataims to build a 1,121-qubit device for release in 2023.

SEE: Quantum computing just took on another big challenge, one that could be as tough as steel

And smaller players are now emerging, often with the goal of exploring alternatives to superconducting qubits that might enable quantum computers to grow faster. UK start-up Quantum Motion, for instance,recently published the result of an experiment with qubits on silicon chips.

"There is a race to get from the tens of qubits that devices have today, to the thousands of qubits that future systems will require to solve real-world problems," said Amir Safavi-Naeini, assistant professor of applied physics at Stanford University. "Rigetti's modular approach demonstrates a very promising way of approaching these scales."

As demonstrated by Rigetti's latest announcement, new approaches, methods and technologies are constantly developing in the quantum ecosystem. It is unlikely that one clear way forward will stand out anytime soon.

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Bigger quantum computers, faster: This new idea could be the quickest route to real world apps - ZDNet

Nippon Steel has concluded that, despite the current hardware limitations of quantum computers, the technology holds a lot of promise when it comes to optimizing complex problems.

From railways and ships all the way to knives and forks: the number of products that are made of steel is too high to list and to ensure a steady supply of the sought-after material, Japanese steel manufacturer Nippon Steel is now looking at how quantum computing might help.

The company, which produced a hefty 50 million tons of steel in 2019 (that is, 40% of the total production in Japan) has partnered with Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) and Honeywell to find out whether quantum computers have the potential to boost efficiencies in the supply chain.

And after over a year of testing and trying new algorithms, the company has concluded that,despite the current hardware limitations of quantum computers, the technology holds a lot of promise when it comes to optimizing complex problems.

"The results Nippon Steel and Cambridge Quantum Computing were able to achieve indicate that quantum computing will be a powerful tool for companies seeking a competitive advantage," said Tony Uttley, the president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions.

SEE: Building the bionic brain (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

The steel manufacturing process is a highly elaborate affair, involving many different steps and requiring various raw materials before the final product can be built.

Plants start by pre-treating and refining iron ore, coal and other minerals to process them into slabs of steel, which are then converted into products like rails, bars, pipes, tubes and wheels.

In the case of Nippon Steel, where millions of tons of material are at stake, finding the best equation to make sure that the right products are in the right place and at the right time is key to delivering orders as efficiently as possible.

Toss in strict deadlines, and it is easy to see why industry leaders are looking for the most advanced tools possible to model and optimize the whole system, and at the same time reduce operating costs.

For this reason, the use of pen and paper has long been replaced by sophisticated software services, and Nippon Steel has been a long-time investor in advanced computing but even today's most powerful supercomputers can struggle to come up with optimal solutions to such complex problems.

Classical computers can only offer simplifications and approximations. The Japanese company, therefore, decided to try its hand at quantum technologies, andannounced a partnership with quantum software firm CQC last year.

"Scheduling at our steel plants is one of the biggest logistical challenges we face, and we are always looking for ways to streamline and improve operations in this area," said Koji Hirano, chief researcher at Nippon Steel.

Quantum computers rely on qubits tiny particles that can take on a special, dual quantum state that enables them to carry out multiple calculations at once. This means, in principle, that the most complex problems that cannot be solved by classical computers in any realistic timeframe could one day be run on quantum computers in a matter of minutes.

The technology is still in its infancy: quantum computers can currently only support very few qubits and are not capable of carrying out computations that are useful at a business's scale. Scientists, rather, are interested in demonstrating the theoretical value of the technology, to be prepared to tap into the potential of quantum computers once their development matures.

In practice, for Nippon Steel, this meant using CQC's services and expertise to discover which quantum algorithms could most effectively model and optimize the company's supply chain.

To do so, the two companies' research teams focused on formulating a small-scale problem, which, although it does not bring significant value to Nippon Steel, can be resolved using today's nascent quantum hardware.

The researchers developed a quantum algorithm for this "representative" problem and ran it on Honeywell's System Model H1 the latest iteration of the company's trapped-ion quantum computing hardware, which has 10 available qubits and a record-breaking quantum volume of 512. After only a few steps, say the scientists, the System Model H1 was able to find an optimal solution.

"The results are encouraging for scaling up this problem to larger instances," said Mehdi Bozzo Rey, the head of business development at CQC. "This experiment showcases the capabilities of the System Model H1 paired with modern quantum algorithms and how promising this emerging technology really is."

What's more: an optimization algorithm such as the one developed by CQC and Nippon Steel can be applied to many other scenarios in manufacturing, transport and distribution.

Earlier this year, for example, IBM and energy giant ExxonMobil revealed that they had been working together tobuild quantum algorithms that could one day optimize the routing of tens of thousands of merchant shipscrossing the oceans to deliver everyday goods a $14 trillion industry that could hugely benefit from operational efficiencies.

The results from Nippon Steel are the first to emerge followingthe announcement of a partnership between Honeywell and CQC earlier this month. CQC's quantum software capabilities are planned to merge with Honeywell's quantum hardware services in a deal that is expected to make waves in the industry.

By joining forces, the two companies are effectively set to become leaders in the quantum ecosystem. The early results from the trials with Nippon Steel, therefore, are likely to be only the start of many new projects to come, as the two firms apply their complementary expertise to global issues affecting various different industries.

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Quantum computing just took on another big challenge, one that could be as tough as steel - ZDNet

Jung-Tsung Shen, associate professor in the Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, has developed a deterministic, high-fidelity, two-bit quantum logic gate that takes advantage of a new form of light. This new logic gate is orders of magnitude more efficient than the current technology. Credit: Jung-Tsung Shen

An efficient two-bit quantum logic gate has been out of reach, until now.

Research from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has found a missing piece in the puzzle of optical quantum computing.

Jung-Tsung Shen, associate professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, has developed a deterministic, high-fidelity two-bit quantum logic gate that takes advantage of a new form of light. This new logic gate is orders of magnitude more efficient than the current technology.

In the ideal case, the fidelity can be as high as 97%, Shen said.

His research was published in May 2021 in the journalPhysical Review A.

The potential of quantum computers is bound to the unusual properties of superposition the ability of a quantum system to contain many distinct properties, or states, at the same time and entanglement two particles acting as if they are correlated in a non-classical manner, despite being physically removed from each other.

Where voltage determines the value of a bit (a 1 or a 0) in a classical computer, researchers often use individual electrons as qubits, the quantum equivalent. Electrons have several traits that suit them well to the task: they are easily manipulated by an electric or magnetic field and they interact with each other. Interaction is a benefit when you need two bits to be entangled letting the wilderness of quantum mechanics manifest.

But their propensity to interact is also a problem. Everything from stray magnetic fields to power lines can influence electrons, making them hard to truly control.

For the past two decades, however, some scientists have been trying to use photons as qubits instead of electrons. If computers are going to have a true impact, we need to look into creating the platform using light, Shen said.

Photons have no charge, which can lead to the opposite problems: they do not interact with the environment like electrons, but they also do not interact with each other. It has also been challenging to engineer and to create ad hoc (effective) inter-photon interactions. Or so traditional thinking went.

Less than a decade ago, scientists working on this problem discovered that, even if they werent entangled as they entered a logic gate, the act of measuring the two photons when they exited led them to behave as if they had been.The unique features of measurement are another wild manifestation of quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics is not difficult, but its full of surprises, Shen said.

The measurement discovery was groundbreaking, but not quite game-changing. Thats because for every 1,000,000 photons, only one pair became entangled. Researchers have since been more successful, but, Shen said, Its still not good enough for a computer, which has to carry out millions to billions of operations per second.

Shen was able to build a two-bit quantum logic gate with such efficiency because of the discovery of a new class of quantum photonic states photonic dimers, photons entangled in both space and frequency. His prediction of their existence was experimentally validated in 2013, and he has since been finding applications for this new form of light.

When a single photon enters a logic gate, nothing notable happens it goes in and comes out. But when there are two photons, Thats when we predicted the two can make a new state, photonic dimers. It turns out this new state is crucial.

High-fidelity, two-bit logic gate, designed by Jung-Tsung Shen. Credit: Jung-Tsung Shen

Mathematically, there are many ways to design a logic gate for two-bit operations. These different designs are called equivalent. The specific logic gate that Shen and his research group designed is the controlled-phase gate (or controlled-Z gate). The principal function of the controlled-phase gate is that the two photons that come out are in the negative state of the two photons that went in.

In classical circuits, there is no minus sign, Shen said. But in quantum computing, it turns out the minus sign exists and is crucial.

Quantum mechanics is not difficult, but its full of surprises.

Jung-Tsung Shen

When two independent photons (representing two optical qubits) enter the logic gate, The design of the logic gate is such that the two photons can form a photonic dimer, Shen said. It turns out the new quantum photonic state is crucial as it enables the output state to have the correct sign that is essential to the optical logic operations.

Shen has been working with the University of Michigan to test his design, which is a solid-state logic gate one that can operate under moderate conditions. So far, he says, results seem positive.

Shen says this result, while baffling to most, is clear as day to those in the know.

Its like a puzzle, he said. It may be complicated to do, but once its done, just by glancing at it, you will know its correct.

Reference: Two-photon controlled-phase gates enabled by photonic dimers by Zihao Chen, Yao Zhou, Jung-Tsung Shen, Pei-Cheng Ku and Duncan Steel, 21 May 2021, Physical Review A. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.103.052610

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, ECCS grants nos. 1608049 and 1838996. It was also supported by the 2018 NSF Quantum Leap (RAISE) Award.

The McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis promotes independent inquiry and education with an emphasis on scientific excellence, innovation and collaboration without boundaries. McKelvey Engineering has top-ranked research and graduate programs across departments, particularly in biomedical engineering, environmental engineering and computing, and has one of the most selective undergraduate programs in the country. With 140 full-time faculty, 1,387 undergraduate students, 1,448 graduate students and 21,000 living alumni, we are working to solve some of societys greatest challenges; to prepare students to become leaders and innovate throughout their careers; and to be a catalyst of economic development for the St. Louis region and beyond.

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Missing Piece Discovered in the Puzzle of Optical Quantum Computing - SciTechDaily

Research led by Kent and theSTFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratoryhas resulted in the discovery of a new rare topological superconductor, LaPt3P. This discovery may be of huge importance to the future operations of quantum computers.

Superconductors are vital materials able to conduct electricity without any resistance when cooled below a certain temperature, making them highly desirable in a society needing to reduce its energy consumption.

They manifest quantum properties on the scale of everyday objects, making them highly attractive candidates for building computers that use quantum physics to store data and perform computing operations, and can vastly outperform even the best supercomputers in certain tasks. As a result, there is an increasing demand from leading tech companies like Google, IBM and Microsoft to make quantum computers on an industrial scale using superconductors.

However, the elementary units of quantum computers (qubits) are extremely sensitive and lose their quantum properties due to electromagnetic fields, heat, and collisions with air molecules. Protection from these can be achieved by making more resilient qubits using a special class of superconductors called topological superconductorswhich in addition to being superconductors also host protected metallic states on their boundaries or surfaces.

Topological superconductors, such as LaPt3P, newly discovered through muon spin relaxation experiments and extensive theoretical analysis, are exceptionally rare and are of tremendous value to the future industry of quantum computing.

To ensure its properties are sample and instrument independent, two different sets of samples were prepared in theUniversity of Warwickand inETH Zurich. Muon experiments were then performed in two different types of muon facilities: in the ISIS Pulsed Neutron and Muon Source in the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and inPSI, Switzerland.

Dr. Sudeep Kumar Ghosh, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at KentsSchool of Physical Sciencesand Principle Investigator said: This discovery of the topological superconductor LaPt3P has tremendous potential in the field of quantum computing. Discovery of such a rare and desired component demonstrates the importance ofmuonresearch for the everyday world around us.

Reference: Chiral singlet superconductivity in the weakly correlated metal LaPt3P by P. K. Biswas, S. K. Ghosh, J. Z. Zhao, D. A. Mayoh, N. D. Zhigadlo, Xiaofeng Xu, C. Baines, A. D. Hillier, G. Balakrishnan and M. R. Lees, 4 May 2021, Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22807-8

The paper is published inNature Communications(University of Kent: Dr. Sudeep K. Ghosh; STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory: Dr. Pabitra K. Biswas, Dr. Adrian D. Hillier; University of Warwick Dr. Geetha Balakrishnan, Dr. Martin R. Lees, Dr. Daniel A. Mayoh; Paul Scherrer Institute: Dr. Charles Baines; Zhejiang University of Technology: Dr. Xiaofeng Xu; ETH Zurich: Dr. Nikolai D. Zhigadlo; Southwest University of Science and Technology: Dr. Jianzhou Zhao).

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Rare Superconductor Discovered May Be Critical for the Future of Quantum Computing - SciTechDaily

The collaboration of the School of Physics and Astronomy, of the University of Minnesota and Cornell University, has revealed some unique properties of a new semiconductor such as a superconducting metal. It has created a breakthrough in quantum computing and can be utilized in the nearby future. The metal is known as Niobium diselenide (NbSe2) that can conduct electricity or transport electrons or photons without any resistance. Quantum computing can reap the benefits of this new superconducting metal effectively and efficiently for new innovations.

Niobium diselenide is in 2D form with two-fold symmetry that makes it a more resilient superconductor. There are two types of superconductivity found in this metal conventional wave-type consisting of bulk NbSe2 and unconventional d- or p- wave type for a few layers of NbSe2. These both have the same kind of energies due to the constant interaction and competition between each other. The research teams from both universities have combined the results of two different experimental techniques to generate this ground-breaking discovery. The scientists wanted to investigate the properties of NbSe2 further to able to use unconventional superconducting states to develop advanced quantum computers.

Superconducting metals, help to explore the boundaries between quantum computing and traditional computing with applications in quantum information. The quantum bits transform the functionalities of quantum computers with much higher speed than the traditional ones. Quantum bits exist in a superposition state along with two values 0 and 1 simultaneously with alpha and beta. Quantum computers require around 10,000 qubits to work smartly and help in the entanglement of natures mysteries. Superconductors can create a solid state of the qubit with quantum dots and single-donor systems. These superconductor metals are known for transforming electrons into a single superfluid that can move through a metal lattice without any resistance.

The discovery of 2D crystalline superconductors has opened a plethora of methods to investigate unconventional quantum mechanics. The top-notch quality of monolayer superconductor, NbSe2, is grown by chemical vapor deposition. The growth of these superconductors depends on the ultrahigh vacuum or dangling bond-free substrates that help to reduce environment and substrate-induced defects.

Hence, the world is waiting for further discoveries of some unique properties of any superconducting metal to help in the advancement of quantum computing that can bring certain breakthroughs in industries.

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Quantum Computing Breakthrough: Unveiling Properties of New Superconductor - Analytics Insight

Polaris Quantum Biotech is reinventing drug discovery, reducing the time it takes to find candidate molecules for drug development from the typical three years to just four months. As with other successful efforts to redesign established processes, Polaris is betting on scalability and automation. The startup, co-founded by Shahar Keinan and Bill Shipman, came out of stealth a year ago, revealing the first-ever drug discovery platform using a quantum computer, cost-efficiently scanning billions of molecules from a large chemical space.

Dr. Shahar Keinan, CEO, Polaris Quantum Biotech

Having worked in the drug development industry for years, Polaris founders decided to try and address the two major challenges they identified: The technology used and the business model. We wanted to solve both of these problems together, says Polaris CEO, Shahar Keinan.

The technology-related part of their solution was to use quantum computing, rather than classical computers, to speed-up the process. In terms of the business model, in contrast to the research labs (or Contract Research Organizations) that provide molecular discovery as a service to large pharmaceutical companies, Polaris is licensing their discoveries. With this business model, says Keinan, you need a diverse portfolio in order to diversify your risk. Diversity here is defined as the target disease, the specific protein targeted, and even the delivery mechanism.

Based on industry benchmarks, out of 100 assets (i.e., drug blueprints, lead compounds), between 1 to 5 will be used in a drug that will be sold commercially. Between 75 to 80 may reach clinical testing but typically this number could be reduced to no more than 25 over subsequent testing phases. Polaris is paid at each stage in the drugs journey to the market, and increasingly more as each hurdle is passed successfully.

The lead compounds Polaris develops target specific biological processes that are known to be the cause of a specific disease and are designed to get involved in the process in a way that arrests its further development or eliminates it altogether. We take this big biological machine and put a wrench into it, says Keinan. The trick is to find a molecule that will do exactly what it is expected to do but will not do other, not useful or potentially harmful, things to other biological processes in the human body.

Polaris is developing an ecosystem around its drug discovery platform, enlisting various hardware and software resources to assist it. Last year, it partnered with Fujitsus quantum-inspired Digital Annealer technology, initially targeting dengue fever, a mosquito-borne condition that is present in over 100 countries worldwide, killing as many as 22,000 people each year. Another quantum computing provider Polaris is working with is D-Wave Systems, accessing its quantum annealing technology through the AWS cloud service.

Yet another Polaris partnership was announced recently, collaborating with Auransa to discover treatments for neglected diseases disproportionately affecting women.An example is endometriosis, an incurable condition affecting millions of women caused when tissue that lines the womb grows elsewhere in the abdomen. Auransa is using AI to develop precision medicine solutions in areas of unmet medical needs, and in this partnership, Auransa finds the biological target and Polaris finds the arrow (the lead compound) that will hit the targets bullseye.

Over the last decade, there has been a growing application of AI (or machine/deep learning) to drug discovery and pharmaceutical company executives expect it to be the emerging technology that will have the greatest impact on their industry in 2021. Last year, a survey of life science organizations found that 31% were set to begin quantum computing evaluation in 2020 and a further 39% were planning to evaluate it in 2021 or have quantum computing on their radar. Polaris Quantum Biotech could well be at the center of a perfect storm that will accelerate the pace of drug discovery.

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This Startup Is Using Quantum Computing And AI To Cut Drug Discovery Time From 3 Years To 4 Months - Forbes

LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., June 24, 2021 The IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE21), a multidisciplinary event bridging the gap between the science of quantum computing and the development of an industry surrounding it, reveals its full keynote lineup. Taking place 18-22 October 2021 virtually, QCE21 will deliver a series of world-class keynote presentations, as well as workforce-building tutorials, community-building workshops, technical paper presentations, stimulating panels, and innovative posters. Register here.

Also known as IEEE Quantum Week, QCE21 is unique by integrating dimensions from academic and business conferences and will reveal cutting edge research and developments featuring quantum research, practice, applications, education, and training.

QCE21s Keynote Speakers include the following quantum groundbreakers and leaders:

Alan Baratz D-Wave Systems, President & CEO James S. Clarke Intel Labs, Director of Quantum Hardware David J. Dean Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Director Quantum Science Center Jay Gambetta IBM Quantum, IBM Fellow & VP Quantum Computing Sonika Johri IonQ, Senior Quantum Applications Research Scientist Anthony Megrant Google Quantum AI, Lead Research Scientist Prineha Narang Harvard University & Aliro Quantum, Professor & CTO Brian Neyenhuis Honeywell Quantum Solutions, Commercial Operations Leader Urbasi Sinha Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, Professor Krista Svore Microsoft, General Manager Quantum Systems

Through participation from the international quantum community, QCE21 has developed an extensive conference program with world-class keynote speakers, technical paper presentations, innovative posters, exciting exhibits, technical briefings, workforce-building tutorials, community-building workshops, stimulating panels, and Birds-of-Feather sessions.

Papers accepted by QCE21 will be submitted to the IEEE Xplore Digital Library, and the best papers will be invited to the journals IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering (TQE) and ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing (TQC).

QCE21 is co-sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Communications Society, IEEE Council of Superconductivity, IEEE Future Directions Committee, IEEE Photonics Society, IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society, IEEE Electronics Packaging Society, IEEE Signal Processing Society (SP), and IEEE Electron Device Society (EDS).

The inaugural 2020 IEEE Quantum Week built a solid foundation and was highly successful over 800 people from 45 countries and 225 companies attended the premier event that delivered 270+ hours of programming on quantum computing and engineering.

The second annual 2021 Quantum Week will virtually connect a wide range of leading quantum professionals, researchers, educators, entrepreneurs, champions, and enthusiasts to exchange and share their experiences, challenges, research results, innovations, applications, and enthusiasm, on all aspects of quantum computing, engineering and technologies. The IEEE Quantum Week schedule will take place during Mountain Daylight Time (MDT).

Visit IEEE QCE21 for all event news including sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities.

QCE21 Registration Package provides Virtual Access to IEEE Quantum Week Oct 18-22, 2021 as well as On-Demand Access to all recorded events until the end of December 2021 featuring over 270 hours of programming in the realm of quantum computing and engineering.

About the IEEE Computer Society

TheIEEE Computer Societyis the worlds home for computer science, engineering, and technology. A global leader in providing access to computer science research, analysis, and information, the IEEE Computer Society offers a comprehensive array of unmatched products, services, and opportunities for individuals at all stages of their professional career. Known as the premier organization that empowers the people who drive technology, the IEEE Computer Society offers international conferences, peer-reviewed publications, a unique digital library, and training programs.

Source: IEEE

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Keynotes Announced for IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering - HPCwire