The Amazing World of Quantum Computing

Alain Aspect

In 1935, Einstein discovered entanglement, an amazing property of quantum mechanics which contradicted his world views. An intense debate with Niels Bohr followed, and was settled only after the discovery by John Bell of the famous inequalities named after him. Bell's theoretical work stimulated experiments, nowadays accessible to university laboratory classes, which demonstrate that entangled twin photons remain a single global object even when at a distance. We must take this conceptual revolution into account in our quantum description of the world. Applications of entanglement are also on the way, and a new field of research, Quantum Information, uses entanglement to develop applications as quantum cryptography and quantum computing. It may well be that we are living a second quantum revolution, which might change our society as strongly as the first quantum revolution did, when it gave us the laser and the transistor (and integrated circuits) at the root of the information and communication society.

Philip L. Roe

Vladimir Silva

My physics teacher used to say that quantum computers are notoriously bad calculators, and then he’ll quote Richard Feynman to emphasize that these machines were conceived with atomic principles in mind; therefore, they should tackle problems at the atomic scale. Nowhere else is this more tangible than in the fields of chemistry and medicine where quantum is already working hard to make a difference. In this chapter, we showcase two amazing real-life experiments that illustrate how the power of quantum computation can make a difference in the real world.

Colin P. Williams

Rajendra Kumar Bera

It now appears that quantum computers are poised to enter the world of computing and establish its dominance, especially, in the cloud. Turing machines (classical computers) tied to the laws of classical physics will not vanish from our lives but begin to play a subordinate role to quantum computers tied to the enigmatic laws of quantum physics that deal with such non-intuitive phenomena as superposition, entanglement, collapse of the wave function, and teleportation, all occurring in Hilbert space. The aim of this 3-part paper is to introduce the readers to a core set of quantum algorithms based on the postulates of quantum mechanics, and reveal the amazing power of quantum computing.

Mikio Nakahara