| | | Quantum Computing Might be Here Sooner Than You Think
It’s a sunny Tuesday morning in late March at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center. The corridor from the reception area follows the long, curving glass curtain-wall that looks out over the visitors’ parking lot to leafless trees covering a distant hill in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., an hour north of Manhattan. Walk past the podium from the Jeopardy! episodes at which IBM’s Watson smote the human champion of the TV quiz show, turn right into a hallway, and you’ll enter a windowless lab where a quantum computer is chirping away.
Actually, “chirp” isn’t quite the right word. It’s a somewhat metallic sound, chush … chush … chush, that’s made by the equipment that lowers the temperature inside a so-called dilution refrigerator to within hailing distance of absolute zero. Encapsulated in a white canister suspended from a frame, the dilution refrigerator cools a superconducting chip studded with a handful of quantum bits, or qubits.
Quantum computing has been around, in theory if not in practice, for several decades. But these new types of machines, designed to harness quantum mechanics and potentially process unimaginable amounts of data, are certifiably a big deal. “I would argue that a working quantum computer is perhaps the most sophisticated technology that humans have ever built,” says Chad Rigetti, founder and chief executive officer of Rigetti Computing, a startup in Berkeley, Calif. Quantum computers, he says, harness nature at a level we became aware of only about 100 years ago—one that isn’t apparent to us in everyday life.
What’s more, the potential of quantum computing is enormous. Tapping into the weird way nature works could potentially speed up computing so some problems that are now intractable to classical computers could finally yield solutions. And maybe not just for chemistry and materials science. With practical breakthroughs in speed on the horizon, Wall Street’s antennae are twitching.
bloomberg.com
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