The Long-Awaited Promise of a Programmable Quantum Computer
March 23rd, 2016Via: MIT Technology Review:
The quest to build a powerful quantum computer is one of the great challenges of 21st century physics. And although the hurdles are significant, physicists are chasing them down, one by one.
They’ve gradually learned how to control quantum particles with the precision necessary to run quantum algorithms on a small scale with just a few qubits.
The big challenge now is scale—combining these techniques in a way that can handle large numbers of qubits and perform powerful quantum calculations. Today, Shantanu Debnath and pals at the University of Maryland in College Park unveil a five-qubit quantum computer module that can be programmed to run any quantum algorithm.
But crucially, they say, this module can be linked to others to perform powerful quantum computations involving large numbers of qubits. “This small quantum computer can be scaled to larger numbers of qubits within a single module, and can be further expanded by connecting many modules,” say Debnath and co.
Related: MIT’s New 5-Atom Quantum Computer Could Make Today’s Encryption Obsolete
