Jon Baer

At times, the growing enthusiasm about quantum computing can overtake the reality of its development — which will be not a race but a marathon across decades to come, extending far beyond the symbolic (and often overhyped) milestone of “quantum supremacy.” However, it is clear that this “second quantum revolution” could prove transformative in the long term. Although Chinese research in quantum computing still lags behind that of top players in the U.S., the ambition and potential that China could take the lead in the course of this marathon should not be discounted.

Since these systems magnify the effects of quantum mechanics to larger scales, they could be used to gain insights about unrelated systems. Perhaps the system could provide insight into the nature of dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the expansion of the universe that seems to account for two-thirds of the universe’s energy, according to a NASA fact sheet.

So far, Intel has produced only test chips, in two flavors. The first, called superconducting quantum chips, are code-named “Tangle Lake.” They consist of 7, 17, or 49 quantum bits. Over time, the hope is to expand each part to thousands of qubits in order to perform complex logic operations. These first parts are really only enough for a very basic logic gate. RF connectors made of gold dot one side of the chips, giving them a distinct look, which you see in the accompanying illustration.

Landauer’s novel approach described a classical bit using a concept from information theory known as Shannon entropy, which characterizes information content. Consider a bit that can be 1 or 0. If you know the bit is always 1, reading a 1 doesn’t yield any information because you expected this result already. Whereas if the bit is equally likely to be 1 or 0, you don’t know what to expect from a reading, so any reading is a surprise. In other words, information on a bit is greatest if measuring it yields the greatest surprise. As explained in the note in Ref. [5], the Shannon entropy is equal to kBln2kBln2 for a “maximally surprising” bit and equal to 0 for a “no-surprise” bit.

Their experiment, which the researchers say could be carried out within a few months, should enable scientists to sneak a glance at where an object—in this case a particle of light, called a photon—actually resides when it is placed in a superposition. And the researchers predict the answer will be even stranger and more shocking than “two places at once.”

Cryptography is a fundamental building block in the security of many systems integral to the modern web. It protects online communications, secures websites, ensures safe transactions between parties, and verifies identities online. Cryptography is used in everything from cell phones, email, e-commerce, to banking information and sensitive national security information.