IBM researchers have taken a leap in computing by using quantum mechanics to harness the power of atoms and molecules, a move likely to lead to vast increases in speed and security of computers and other devices. IBM researchers presenting the results at this week's American Physical Society meeting in Boston said that quantum computing "has the potential to deliver computational power that is unrivalled by any supercomputer today."
The new type of computing uses information encoded into quantum bits or qubits, putting into use a theory that scientists have been discussing for decades. "The special properties of qubits will allow quantum computers to work on millions of computations at once, while desktop PCs can typically handle minimal simultaneous computations," an IBM statement said. "For example, a single 250-qubit state contains more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe."
"The quantum computing work we are doing shows it is no longer just a brute force physics experiment," said IBM scientist Matthias Steffen, manager of the research team that is working on applications for quantum computing systems. "It's time to start creating systems based on this science that will take computing to a new frontier." Quantum computing expands on the most basic piece of information that a typical computer understands - a bit. While a normal bit can have only one of two values: "1" or "0," qubits can hold a value of "1" or "0" as well as both values at the same time.
"Described as superposition, this is what allows quantum computers to perform millions of calculations at once," IBM says. A problem for scientists is that qubits have a short life of several billionths of a second, but IBM has succeeded in developing "three dimensional" superconducting qubits which retain their quantum states up to 100 microseconds - an improvement of two to four times prior records.
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