Just simulating the abilities of a 40-qubit quantum computer would use all the resources of any of the most advanced supercomputers in the world.
D-Wave Systems announced today that it has signed a multi-year contract with Lockheed Martin that includes the sale of its D-Wave One system, which is the first commercially available quantum computer.
The IBM team's quantum computer was a straw-thin vial filled with a rust-colored liquid packed with millions of copies of a single organic molecule.
"Although we are still some way off actually building a quantum computer, the possibilities are extraordinary, " says Professor Neil Johnson of the University of Miami's Department of Physics.
The Air Force is working to see if it can develop a low-power quantum computer using holograms and off the shelf parts.
FORBES: The Air Force Is Working On A Holographic Quantum Computer
The strange science of quantum mechanics promises a revolution in computer power as radical as that following the invention of the transistor in the 1950s.
Even if up to a quarter of the qubits were lost, a quantum computer could still work.
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One advantage of this method of making a quantum computer is that the atomic qubit stores can be manipulated relatively easily.
This ability would allow a quantum computer to do the mathematical heavy-lifting required for, say, cracking secret codes, while even the fastest and most advanced supercomputers plod along on the same problem.
Another student, named Yushi Wang, applied the principles of quantum physics to design a faster computer chip.
Now Vlatko Vedral, an Oxford physicist, examines the claim that bits of information are the universe's basic units, and the universe as a whole is a giant quantum computer.
Superposition is, nevertheless, crucial to the idea of building what is known as a quantum computer.
The D-Wave computer operates as an adiabatic quantum computer, and consists of a superconducting 128-qubit chip in a cryogenics system within a 10 square meter room.
But these packets, called photons, are also endowed with the indeterminate properties that make them quantum objects - so an optical computer can also be a quantum computer.
"It is true that any task a classical computer can do, a quantum computer can do, " says Jeff Kimble, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
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