More physical progress

More physical progress, out of the University of Queensland.

Solid state qubits

More progress on physical implementations of quantum computers: solid state qubits?

LED for Entangled Light

Toshiba has created an "entangled light emitting diode" (ELED) which can create entangled photons. Maybe the optical approach towards quantum computing will be viable. You can read more at the ABC News article.

Another Physical Advancement by NIST

NIST has created a quantum dimmer switch, another step forward towards physical implementations of quantum computers. (NIST announcement)

Article on Implementing Quantum Computers

I came across this article: Quantum computers are coming- just don't ask when. I'm no expert on physical implementations of quantum computers, but I thought it gave a good overview of some of the current physical implementations and challenges. The optimistic view of overcoming the challenges for building and quantum computers is right on target in my opinion.

I also thought that the end of the article was particularly noteworthy: it mentions that the first quantum computers may be devices that are originally used as subsystems of classical computers. This is Knill's QRAM model as I've previously written about. It is good to see that the software and hardware worlds of quantum computing are thinking along the same lines for initial implementations. There is a lot of work still to be done, but we're making good progress.

William Halal on Quantum Computing

William Halal published a book titled "Technology's Promise: Expert Knowledge on the Transformation of Business and Society" in 2008 [1]. (You can find it here on Amazon.) I had read an early draft of the book in the summer of 2007 prior to a presentation he did at Colorado Technical University's Institute for Advanced Studies.

Quantum computers currently don't exist outside the lab. What we do have in the lab doesn't consist of more than a few handfuls of qubits. This is because physically implementing quantum computers is a very hard task do to decoherence. In other words the system must be isolated from the outside environment. If the qubits interact with the outside environment then it is an observation and the system will "collapse" out of superposition and yield a classical result.

Given the difficulty in implementing quantum computers, there are a wide variety of guesses on when and if they'll become available. I've heard everything from we have them now (D-Wave systems) to we'll never have them.

What William Halal has done is utilize the work of the TechCast project to gather the opinions of 100 experts to come up with best guesses. (These experts are gathered from around the world.) According to this, he lists that "...quantum computers are likely to become available about 2021 +/- 5 years" in "Technology's Promise".

I think the prediction of 2021 is a reasonable one. This still gives us 12 years to overcome the challenges of creating them, which is quite a long time in technology. I wouldn't be too surprised if some hurdles pushed us out a few years, but I also wouldn't be surprised if we made some leaps that also rained the date in a few years. In any case, I expect to see some big advances toward making quantum computing a reality in the next decade or two.

References
[1] W. E. Halal, Technology's Promise: Expert Knowledge on the Transformation of Business and Society, 1 ed. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.