Quantum computing provides tremendous data processing power. Quantum computing is not going to replace classical computers, but the amazing computing power could be leveraged in the field of medicine, chemistry, material science and other fields.
Classical computers store and process information in the form of binary numbers or bits. A single bit is represented as 0 or 1. The basic unit of a quantum chip is a qubit — these are subatomic particles (electrons or photons) controlled and manipulated by specially designed electric and magnetic fields.
Qubits can be made in different ways — use of superconductors, semiconductors, photonics and other approaches.
It is not the quantity of qubits that a chip has is important. It is the quality of qubits. A quantum chip with thousands of low-quality qubits will not be able to perform any useful function. Qubits are sensitive to unwanted disturbances from many sources. This reduces the reliability of a qubit (known as fidelity.). A computer chip must have high-fidelity qubits.
It is not necessary to build such perfect chips. There are techniques to have low-fidelity qubits encoding abstract logical qubits which are immune to errors and therefore, of high-fidelity. A useful quantum processor must be based on many logical qubits.
Quantum chips consisting of over 100 qubits are available. Till now, developers have only made single logical qubits. It will take some time to put several logical qubits together on a quantum chip.
The aim is to reach quantum supremacy — a quantum processor solves a problem that would take a classical computer a very long time to solve.
Quantum hardware (processors) are progressing. At the same time, researchers are developing and testing various quantum algorithms.
A full-scale quantum computer is still a daunting task where so many things will have to fall in place– number of qubits on a chip, improving fidelity of qubits, improved error correction, quantum software, quantum algorithms and various other sub-fields of quantum computing.
Leave a Reply