7.4 Quantum Computers


The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Serge Haroche and David Wineland for Quantum Entanglement, which is a phenomenon that enables the manipulation and measurement of individual quantum systems without destroying them. This may pave the way for superfast computers, called quantum computers. Some of the smartest physicists, mathematicians and information theorists today are driving this development. Quantum computers may find applications in inverse problems, like those which the industry is trying to solve in geophysics. Give it 20–30 years, and you will have quantum computer desktops.


God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein


Will we ever have the amount of computing power that we need or want? What is the next era of computing? If we agree with Moore’s Law, the years 2020–2030 will find the circuits on a microprocessor measured on an atomic scale. Te logical next step will be to develop quantum computers, which tap directly into the field of quantum mechanics to speed computation. As of 2016, the development of quantum computers is still in its infancy, but experiments have been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of quantum bits. Academic research labs and universities around the world and companies such as IBM, NASA, Google, Microsoft and Lockheed Martin have been working on the basic building blocks of a quantum computer for some years. But most


people, like us, do not really understand what quantum computing is and isn’t. We will not even attempt to give a full explanation, but only an introduction. Recall that a conventional computer stores information as 0s


or 1s. Most real numbers are stored with a set of 64 zeroes or ones—i.e. bits. However, the quantum computer uses quantum bits, or qubits – which can be a 1 or a 0 or both at the same time, a condition known as a superposition. Qubits represent particles – atoms, ions, photons or electrons – and their respective control devices work together to act as computer memory and a processor. Because qubits can exist in quantum superposition, or multiple states simultaneously, the quantum computer has the potential to be millions of times more powerful than today’s most powerful supercomputers. But – of


Figure 7.13: Sorry Albert, but it looks like the universe is one big dice game. Recent studies have confirmed that the ‘spooky action at a distance’ that so upset Einstein — the notion that two entangled particles separated by long distances can instantly affect each other — has been proven to work.


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