PARTICLE 101: QUANTUM COMPUTERS

1 month ago

While their processor spot whitethorn look for illustration nan 1 successful your laptop, a quantum machine won’t fresh successful your laptop bag. Some are truthful large they require aggregate rooms.

Their ample copper cooling systems and solid tubes lucifer a sci-fi chandelier.

In 2019, Google built a quantum machine that outperformed a classical supercomputer.

This provides dream that quantum computers will lick immoderate large problems and reply immoderate important questions 1 day.

What happens astatine an atomic level successful a battery? What is nan astir businesslike measurement to present packages astir a city? How tin we accurately simulate nan effects of c dioxide connected nan climate?

Quantum computers besides clasp nan cardinal to unlocking our strongest encryption systems, including banks and authorities websites.

WHAT MAKES A QUANTUM COMPUTER QUANTUM?

Normal computers tally connected bits, or binary digits. They’re called binary digits because location are 2 options: 0 aliases 1. Much for illustration heads and tails.

Quantum computers have quantum bits, called qubits.

Qubits are mini quantum particles that besides usage 0s and 1s, but they tin beryllium some 0 and 1 simultaneously. Think of a spinning coin – heads and tails astatine nan aforesaid time.

For example, if you wanted to find nan fastest measurement to thrust to work, you would trial each way individually. A quantum machine would trial each azygous way astatine once.

When qubits are some 0 and 1 astatine nan aforesaid time, this is called a superposition.

Caption: Schrödinger’s feline successful nan container successful a superposition of dormant and alive.
Credit: Cristineagoe via Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0

Schrodinger’s cat was successful a superposition excessively – some dormant and alive.

Qubits are also entangled aliases connected. If you alteration one, nan entangled qubit will instantly alteration arsenic well.

Einstein erstwhile referred to this arena as ‘spooky action astatine a distance’ because it seems to defy reality.

Entanglement is what gives quantum computers their exponentially greater computational power.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Quantum computers are a comparatively caller concept.

Physicists only suggested they were imaginable successful the 1980s. We person made a batch of advancement since then.

Caption: Quantum Computer
Credit: IBM

In 2022, the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre successful Perth received 1 of nan first room-temperature quantum computers. Most person to beryllium cryogenically cooled to -273°C, which is very impractical.

The early of quantum computers is agleam but there’s a agelong measurement to spell until they will beryllium genuinely useful. After all, they’re still successful their awkward toddler phase.

Once they’re each grown up, quantum computers will alteration everything.

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