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Physics World

Quantum computing–a commercial reality?

Published Apr 1, 2007• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The 300 or so scientists, journalists and entrepreneurs who gathered at the Computer History Museum in California's Silicon Valley on 13 February had, on the face of it, come to see a man solve a Sudoku puzzle on a laptop. Why did they bother turning up, you might ask. The reason was that the puzzle was apparently not being solved by the laptop, but by another computer, connected over the Internet, that was sitting in a lab in Vancouver. This second computer was no ordinary digital device but, according to the company D-Wave carrying out the demonstration, the "world's first commercially viable quantum computer".

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/20/4/19

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The 300 or so scientists, journalists and entrepreneurs who gathered at the Computer History Museum in California's Silicon Valley on 13 February had, on the face of it, come to see a man solve a Sudoku puzzle on a laptop. Why did they bother turning up, you might ask. The reason was that the puzzle was apparently not being solved by the laptop, but by another computer, connected over the Internet, that was sitting in a lab in Vancouver. This second computer was no ordinary digital device but, according to the company D-Wave carrying out the demonstration, the "world's first commercially viable quantum computer".
A happy accident in the laboratory has led to a breakthrough discovery that not only solved a problem that stood for more than half a century, but has major implications for the development of quantum computers and sensors. [55] Significant technical and financial issues remain towards building a large, fault-tolerant quantum computer and one is unlikely to be built within the coming decade. [54] Chemists at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (Germany) have now synthesised a molecule that can perform the function of a computing unit in a quantum computer. [53] The research team developed the first optical microchip to generate, manipulate and detect a particular state of light called squeezed vacuum, which is essential for HYPERLINK https://phys.org/tags/quantum/ quantum computation. [52] Australian scientists have investigated new directions to scale up qubits-utilising the spin-orbit coupling of atom qubits-adding a new suite of tools to the armory. [51] A team of international researchers led by engineers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have invented a new magnetic device to manipulate digital information 20 times more efficiently and with 10 times more stability than commercial spintronic digital memories. [50] Working in the lab of Mikhail Lukin, the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics and co-director of the Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative, Evans is lead author of a study, described in the journal Science, that demonstrates a method for engineering an interaction between two qubits using photons. [49] Researchers with the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have demonstrated a new level of control over photons encoded with quantum information. [48] Researchers from Intel Corp. and the University of California, Berkeley, are looking beyond current transistor technology and preparing the way for a new type of memory and logic circuit that could someday be in every computer on the planet. [47]
Quantum computing is the first digital support technology we explore in this book in more detail. It is sometimes portrayed as brilliant scientists exploring the most obscure natural phenomena in exotic laboratories and aiming to build very powerful science fiction supercomputers that are practically capable of doing anything. But this public perception has been changing lately since various tech companies around the world have invested in this technology to apply it to real-life business problems and explore potential use cases. Among them are Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Honeywell, for instance, just to mention a few pioneers in this ongoing field of industrial research. They frequently report on their latest achievements, highlight current business applications, and emphasize the great prospects of this digital technology. Even The New York Times picked up this trend lately and described quantum computing as one of the most “jazziest and most mysterious concepts of modern science” [1].
BM is betting on quantum computing, but it can't win without the help of startups. And how long it will take for the bet to pay off is anybody's guess. That was the message of the Q Summit, a one-day meeting of quantum-computing researchers, investors, and entrepreneurs hosted by IBM in Menlo Park, Calif., in April. Quantum computing would open the door to a new universe of problem solving, and it could disrupt some conventional digital technologies. The potential is big, but the risks are huge.
Adiabatic Quantum Computing (AQC) is a relatively new subject in the world of quantum computing, let alone Physics. Inspiration for this project has come from recent controversy around D-Wave Systems in British Columbia, Canada, who claim to have built a working AQC which is now commercially available and hope to be distributing a 1024 qubit chip by the end of 2008. Their 16 qubit chip was demonstrated online for the Supercomputing 2007 conference within which a few small problems were solved; although the explanations that journalists and critics received were minimal and very little was divulged in the question and answer session. This 'unconvincing' demonstration has caused physicists and computer scientists to hit back at D-Wave. The aim of this project is to give an introduction to the historic advances in classical and quantum computing and to explore the methods of AQC. Through numerical simulations an algorithm for the Max Independent Set problem is empirically obtained.