Verdal on the cover of the new Scientific American

Vlatko Verdal, of [1] fame, wrote an article titled "Living in a Quantum World", which made the cover of this month's (June 2011) cover of Scientific American.

References
[1] Vedral, Vlatko. Introduction to Quantum Information Science. 1 ed. Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 2006.

SA: The Next 20 Years of Microchips

Scientific American has published an article in this month's (January 2010) issue titled The Next 20 Years of Microchips: Pushing Performance Boundaries. It gives a good 50,000 foot overview (about half a page each) to several areas computers will probably move into over the next decade or two. Quantum computing is mentioned as one of them, and the fact that they've been writing about the subject often recently reflects the growing interest in the field. The article also covers other topics such as optical and biological computing.

If you're a graduate student looking for a research area, I recommend checking out this article. Picking a "bleeding edge" subject means there is still a lot of work to be done- and this article mentions a lot of these subjects. This can make identifying a particular niche to fill much easier, and obviously there is less of a chance of someone doing the same thing in parallel. (A classic doctoral student fear: having someone else publish the same thing right before you finish.) Not only does it make things easier, but I personally found it extremely interesting and rewarding working on a topic that is ahead of the curve.

Overcoming Decoherence

Here's a good article in this month's Scientific American: How Noise Can Help Quantum Entanglement.

Decoherence is the largest obstacle in the physical implementation of quantum computers, so steps towards overcoming the current problems with it are important.