Quantum chip out of Bristol

They've made some recent progress at Bristol University, making a small quantum chip. Some articles:

• TechEye
• Crazy Engineers
• ZME Science
• And of course, the Bristol press release.
  

Optical chip for quantum computing

Out of the University of Bristol: Optical chip enables new approach to quantum computing.

Chip Scale Quantum Computer

I'd like to thank one of my dissertation readers, Dr. Thompson, for sending this my way: Quantum Chip Helps Crack Code. In a nutshell researchers at the University of Bristol did the part of factoring (finding the period) that needs a quantum computer on a chip sized device that is optical based.

They only did the period finding for factoring 15, which in itself doesn't sound too impressive- but this is on an actual quantum computer. Furthermore this is on a chip sized device, there isn't a need for a whole lab full of equipment to carry this out. Pretty impressive. I don't know if the approach is scalable, but perhaps it points towards our initial quantum computers being too large in size.

This together with NIST's work I wrote about recently has made this a pretty exciting past few months towards realizing commercial quantum computers.