Last year, we reported that a new era of quantum computing is upon us: the NISQ, or Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum era, in which quantum computers are still small and error prone, but they actually do something valuable. That second part is still somewhat aspirational, though, so companies like Google are offering…
A commercially available “quantum computer” has been on the market since 2011, but it’s controversial. The D-Wave machine is nothing like other quantum computers, and until recently, scientists have doubted that it was even truly quantum at all. But the company has released an important new result, one that in part…
“Diamonds are forever” is a cliche that fails to fully encapsulate the many strange properties of diamonds. But a new kind of diamond, one loaded with impurities, relies on a sort of foreverness that could be useful in future quantum technology—maybe even a quantum internet.
Quantum computing has made it to the United States Congress. If this field of quantum information is the new space race, the US doesn’t want to fall behind.
Quantum computers are currently best at doing a subset of tasks that regular computers can also do, except in a more expensive, esoteric, and inaccurate way. But this won’t be the case for much longer, as the field of quantum computing continues to hit new milestones. And new partnerships between IBM and some…
Microsoft just announced a quantum-computing advancement today: a measurement that looks like an electron split in half in a piece of wire. It will be of central importance if the company hopes to create a working quantum computer.
Google announced its newest 72-qubit quantum computer, called Bristlecone, at a conference and in a blog post yesterday. That’s a big step over the competition—but how big a deal is it?
On a large plot of land beneath circling turkey vultures an hour north of New York City sits a crescent-shaped building. Inside of it are some of the world’s most cutting-edge quantum computers, stored in dilution refrigerators about the right size to hold an adult human. And beside one of those setups, atop a large…
Your data may be safe from a quantum attack... for now. When quantum computers develop the ability to crack present-day encryption mechanisms, will you be ready?
There’s another quantum computer to keep track of in this Wild West era of quantum computing research we’re in. And it uses some parts you might already be familiar with.
In September, the Chinese Academy of Sciences president Chunli Bai, and President Anton Zeilinger of the Austria Academy of Sciences in Vienna, made the first quantum-secured video call. But when will you get to take part in this? Will there ever be a secure quantum Slack at your workplace?
Quantum computing might be nascent, but recent advancements have brought us into a new age. And every new era needs a name. So when future computing historians look back on the era starting around 2017, they’ll have a word to describe it: the NISQ era.
It’s time to gaze into our crystal ball and see what the coming year has in store for science. From powerful new rockets and asteroid-sampling spacecraft to groundbreaking particle physics, there’s plenty to look forward to in 2018.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Earlier this week, representatives from automotive and airline companies, big banks, software companies, and the military met to learn the basics of quantum mechanics at NASA. And that was only a small part of it.
There’s a nebulous concept that’s floating around the public conscious, called quantum advantage or quantum supremacy. One of these days, someone is going to boldly declare that they’ve created a quantum computer that can solve some complex problem that a regular computer can’t.
They will never sit on your desk, and they will most certainly never fit in your pocket. Today, they’re fragile, and need to be kept at temperatures close to absolute zero. Quantum computers aren’t much like the desktop PCs we’re all so familiar with—they’re a whole new kind of machine, capable of calculations so…
On Monday, a team of scientists in Australia announced an exciting breakthrough: For the first time, researchers were able to turn light into sound on a microchip. But—as crazy-sounding new physics applications tend to be—it’s probably going to be a long time before you see one of these chips on a computer you can…
As cool as they sound, quantum computers will probably not be best suited for designing websites or making pretty word processors. Instead, their quirky bits may one day be used to solve special algorithms, for artificial intelligence applications, or to model things that actually follow the wild rules of quantum…
There are weeks where it seems like every piece of physics news mentions quantum computing—but we are nowhere near a quantum iPhone. You probably remember that computers can consist of billions of nanometer-scale transistors etched into silicon. Those chips used to be enormous, room-sized setups where instead of…
Quantum mechanics may force you to think some wild things about the way the Universe works, but it has some real applications. One of the theory’s main quirks allows for a special kind of quantum link, one that can send incredibly secure messages or transmit data for quantum computing. Tests of these links exist on…
