Tuesday, August 11, 2009

A Step Towards Practical Quantum Computers

This was passed on to me from the head of my Doctoral committee, Dr. Sanden: At NIST they've implemented successive quantum operations on qubits, in addition to multiple teleports. You can check out the article on Technology Review here.

While I'm not a physicist, and thus less involved in physical implementations of quantum computers, this is pretty exciting news. Decoherence is a big problem in physical implementations- essentially the state unintentionally collapsing through inadvertant measurement. When any measurement (perhaps partial) occurs the qubits collapse from possible superposition to a state that can be represented classically, that is by bits instead of qubits. So essentially one can think of decoherence as unintended measurements taking a system out of superposition.

(On a somewhat related note, this is why quantum operations must be reversible. Irreversible operations require energy to erase information, and input of energy acts as a measurement.)

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