First solid-state quantum processor developed.
Friday 03 July 2009 at 19:06.
Tags: computers, processors, quantum_computing, research, solid_state, technology, yale
Quantum computing, thought by many to be the holy grail of information technology, is based upon one of the basic tenants of quantum mechanics: a particle, be it a photon, a hydrogen atom, or a molecule of water, exists in a multitude of states (location, spin, orientation, what have you) until you actually examine it, at which time the particle suddenly 'picks' a state and stays that way as long as you're watching. At least that's the most commonly quoted interpretation of the math. At Yale University a team of scientists has created the first purely electronic quantum processor and put it through a basic set of tests. The quantum processor implements only two qubits but that's enough to search and sort an array of values. More's the point, this is the first non-trivial quantum processor built using solid-state electronics and not lasers and beam splitters. Each qubit isn't made up of individual atoms but molecules of aluminum which exhibit the same properties en masse for limited periods of time. By limited periods of time, I mean somewhen in the neighborhood of a microsecond. Not long, to be sure, but several orders of magnetude longer than the first qubits created ten years ago which lasted for a couple of nanoseconds at most.
I'd say this is most definitely a technology to keep an eye on. It's taken ten years to go from a single photon to a pair of (massive) aluminum molecules on a chip. Where will quantum processing be in another decade? And when will they leave the lab?
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three comments.
There are probably some cryptosystems which would be nontrivially difficult to crack with a quantum computer but I have no idea what they are, or what they could be. As it stands right now, quantum computers would be good for brute-force searches of the keyspaces of certain algorithms but to be practical you’d probably need many more qubits.
The idea of genome-sized keys sounds interesting – that strongly suggests moving toward multiple tokens containing keying information to make brute-force keyspace searches unlikely to succeed.
The Doctor (URL) - 14-07-’09 19:25
As for the construction of a practical ansible, I really don’t know. I’ve read a number of stories in which previously-entangled particles were used as a low-bandwidth transmission medium for (largely covert) communication.
The Doctor (URL) - 14-07-’09 19:27
I’ve been fascinated by quantum computing since I learned of it over a decade ago. Ultimately, it may make encryption obsolete or at least cumbersomely difficult to implement – imagine needing genome-sized keys just to make it non-trivial to crack.
I also wonder if this technology might also open the way to develop ansibles. ‘course, I’ve nothing like the physics knowledge to even really guess.
Hasufin - 14-07-’09 01:12