The Ins and Outs of Quantum Computing

The Roaring 20s, known for the rise of Jazz, Prohibition, Al Capone, and literary masterpieces like The Great Gatsby, was an illustrious time of vibrant and transformative culture in the United States. It is here, in the Jazz Age, that our current feeling of modernity arises. From advances in cameras and radios, to the manufacturing of automobiles, technological advances crept and altered the everyday lives of all. It is also here that the groundwork for our understanding of quantum mechanics is first formed.  

Quantum refers to objects being in their smallest amount. In essence, imagine paying someone $100. Giving them a $100 bill would be an easy transaction; however, the quantum approach would be paying the individual in 100 $1 bills. In science, quantum, refers to the smallest possible scales of matter. How the quantum world influences the world around us is what drives quantum mechanics.

Just as technological innovations revolutionized everyday life in the 1920s, technologies rooted in quantum mechanics shape our daily lives today. One such technology is the use of transistors in microchips. Transistors are tiny gates that control the flow of electricity. When electricity is flowing, that transistor reads a 1, however when there is no electrical flow, the transistor reads 0. Theses 1s and 0s are called bits; for computers, bits are the most basic unit of communicating information. For computers to ramp up the amount of data and bits they can process, they need more and more transistors packed into a single microchip. Corban Murphey describes this really well in his article called, “The birth and inevitable death of Moore’s Law.” As Murphey points out, we are reaching the physical limit of how many transistors we can pack into a given area; fortunately, quantum computing can alleviate this technological hurdle.

Quantum computers, unlike traditional processors, use qubits or quantum bits rather than just normal 1s and 0s to store information. Qubits can store information as either a 1, a 0, or as both a 1 and 0 at the same time, also known as the quantum mechanical phenomenon: the Superposition. The superposition is a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics that refers to the idea that the total response of a system to something is equal to its individual responses added together.  In essence, this quantum mechanical property allows a qubit to hold more information than a traditional bit. A quantum computer is able to manipulate these qubits. Because qubits can hold more information than a traditional bit, this gives the quantum computer leverage to outperform traditional CPUs (central processing units).

Recently, the tech industry has been making big waves in the media. Google announced the development of Willow, their state of the art 105-Qubit Quantum Computer. Willow, when performing a standard benchmark, completed the task in under 5 minutes, a feat that would take the world’s fastest supercomputers longer than the age of the universe. On the heels of this breakthrough, Microsoft announced the development of Majorana 1 where they created a new state of matter to help stabilize the quantum chip. With major players, like Amazon announcing its Ocelot Chip, leading the charge toward quantum innovation, the development of the technology is accelerating at an unrelenting pace.  

Just as the human experience was altered by technological advances in communications in the Roaring 20s and by access to the internet in the early 2000, the human experience may be altered once again by the development of quantum computing. As the race to perfectly fit as many silica atoms as possible per square millimeter continues and the climb to enhanced computing becomes steeper and steeper, quantum computing offers a way to not only bypass but accelerate that progress at unrelenting speeds.

 Peer Editor:  Elizabeth Abrash