Posted on 10/05/2015 1:38:55 PM PDT by LibWhacker
The significant advance, by a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney appears today in the international journal Nature.
"What we have is a game changer," said team leader Andrew Dzurak, Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW.
"We've demonstrated a two-qubit logic gate - the central building block of a quantum computer - and, significantly, done it in silicon. Because we use essentially the same device technology as existing computer chips, we believe it will be much easier to manufacture a full-scale processor chip than for any of the leading designs, which rely on more exotic technologies.
"This makes the building of a quantum computer much more feasible, since it is based on the same manufacturing technology as today's computer industry," he added.
The advance represents the final physical component needed to realise the promise of super-powerful silicon quantum computers, which harness the science of the very small - the strange behaviour of subatomic particles - to solve computing challenges that are beyond the reach of even today's fastest supercomputers.
In classical computers, data is rendered as binary bits, which are always in one of two states: 0 or 1. However, a quantum bit (or 'qubit') can exist in both of these states at once, a condition known as a superposition. A qubit operation exploits this quantum weirdness by allowing many computations to be performed in parallel (a two-qubit system performs the operation on 4 values, a three-qubit system on 8, and so on).
"If quantum computers are to become a reality, the ability to conduct one- and two-qubit calculations are essential," said Dzurak, who jointly led the team in 2012 who demonstrated the first ever silicon qubit, also reported in Nature.
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Until now, it had not been possible to make two quantum bits 'talk' to each other - and thereby create a logic gate - using silicon. But the UNSW team - working with Professor Kohei M. Itoh of Japan's Keio University - has done just that for the first time.
The result means that all of the physical building blocks for a silicon-based quantum computer have now been successfully constructed, allowing engineers to finally begin the task of designing and building a functioning quantum computer.
A key advantage of the UNSW approach is that they have reconfigured the 'transistors' that are used to define the bits in existing silicon chips, and turned them into qubits. "The silicon chip in your smartphone or tablet already has around one billion transistors on it, with each transistor less than 100 billionths of a metre in size," said Dr Menno Veldhorst, a UNSW Research Fellow and the lead author of the Nature paper.
"We've morphed those silicon transistors into quantum bits by ensuring that each has only one electron associated with it. We then store the binary code of 0 or 1 on the 'spin' of the electron, which is associated with the electron's tiny magnetic field," he added.
Dzurak noted that that the team had recently "patented a design for a full-scale quantum computer chip that would allow for millions of our qubits, all doing the types of calculations that we've just experimentally demonstrated."
He said that a key next step for the project is to identify the right industry partners to work with to manufacture the full-scale quantum processor chip.
Such a full-scale quantum processor would have major applications in the finance, security and healthcare sectors, allowing the identification and development of new medicines by greatly accelerating the computer-aided design of pharmaceutical compounds (and minimizing lengthy trial and error testing); the development of new, lighter and stronger materials spanning consumer electronics to aircraft; and faster information searching through large databases.
It’s a great day for government surveillance and also (probably) for pron.
If I pose a question to a quantum computer, will I get a different result each time?
If I turn my quantum computer off when I leave the room, since I am not there looking at it, how do I know it isn’t on? How do I know it is even there?
Better stronger faster.
Especially after it zaps you wth a death ray.
I find articles like this to be fascinating, and appreciate how they put in layman’s terms (by and large), what is happening in the study of matter. I wonder whether we will find a substitute for electricity which is predominantly, if not exclusively, subject to grid applications.
Send the cat to look into the box.
He’s been there, done that, and has the tee shirt.
;>)
The Chinese have already developed a way to hack into it I bet. /s
Interesting. IBM and Google have already done this except they used graphene.
Skynet became self-aware November 16, 2015.
“Such a full-scale quantum processor would have major applications in the finance, security and healthcare sectors, allowing the identification and development of new medicines by greatly accelerating the computer-aided design of pharmaceutical compounds (and minimizing lengthy trial and error testing); the development of new, lighter and stronger materials spanning consumer electronics to aircraft; and faster information searching through large databases.”
They don’t mention what will possibly be the most radical application: the ability to crack all existing encryption of data in mere minutes.
I doubt we’ll replace electricity for power transmission. It doesn’t get much faster or more convenient than that.
We did come up with a way to eliminate “the grid”, way back in the early 20th century. Nikolai Tesla worked out the basics of transmitting electricity wirelessly instead of over wires. If we used that system, we could just stick an antenna on every electronic device and have them pull the power they need out of the air.
However, you can’t easily bill people using that method, because there wouldn’t be any meters to tell you who is using the power, so it never caught on with the power companies.
And what is the probability that it will give you the correct answer?
Bet it caused the stray cats and dogs around his lab to mutate. :)
Wonder how well it would work today with all of the RF devices that we use and at the very high power levels required? And then there is the cancer factor.
“Bet it caused the stray cats and dogs around his lab to mutate. :)”
Nah, it just teleported them and created a duplicate of them each time :)
“Wonder how well it would work today with all of the RF devices that we use and at the very high power levels required? And then there is the cancer factor.”
I’m not sure, I don’t think his experiments ever got large enough for us to get all that data. He was more in the “proof of concept” phase.
It will always give you the correct answer because it will give you every possible answer.
You just have to figure out which one is correct.
:)
Don't overstate the case. Nothing, other than capturing the keys, can crack one-time-binary-pads (or their old paper-and-pencil analogue, one-time random running-key Vigenere encryption). And it's only encryption methods that depend on problems solvable by a version of Schor's algorithm being intractable that fall to a quantum computer.
Unfortunately, almost everything on the internet uses either DH or RSA for key agreement before switching to private-key algorithms with the agreed keys.
So the energy is pre-existing in electrical form and could theoretically be drawn at will at any point, provided the means exist? I may be reading you wrong on that. But if it is true, it seems any number of entrepreneurs would jump on the notion as a way to market independence from the grid/power companies. But then, lobbyists for the electric companies would invoke government as a means to thwart such innovation, citing public safety as the predominant concern.
The problem was, it still cost just as much to generate the electricity, but nobody could figure out how to make money of it if they delivered it that way. So there’s no profit motive to deliver it wirelessly.
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