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In my laboratory, we develop quantum computer systems based mostly on single photons, the basic particles of sunshine. In 2020, our pc was the primary worldwide to show ‘quantum benefit’: it accomplished a calculation in 200 seconds that might take a traditional supercomputer greater than 2 billion years.
Immediately’s computer systems and cellphones carry out calculations utilizing a binary code of 1s and 0s. Their silicon transistors may be solely ever in both the 1 or the 0 state: on or off. But when we use elementary particles corresponding to photons to carry out calculations, quantum results come into play. Within the quantum world, the place a wave-like photon may be in two locations directly, you may have 1 and 0 concurrently. Quantum computer systems can reap the benefits of this ‘superposition’ to unravel sure issues exponentially sooner than classical computation can.
Right here, I’m trying by way of the management electronics a part of our quantum pc. The management electronics ‘section lock’ our photons in order that they arrive within the pc collectively, with 15-nanometre precision. The machine performs calculations on the premise of the photons’ interactions.
Once I accepted a professorship on the College of Science and Expertise of China, my first quantum machine may management solely six single photons. By 2020, my crew had a machine that might management as much as 76, and show quantum benefit. We are actually as much as 130 photons.
Quantum benefit was once referred to as quantum ‘supremacy’. It is extremely good that the brand new terminology has been adopted.
The issue that our pc solved to indicate quantum benefit may be very summary, a mathematical proof. My subsequent steps are to scale the pc to regulate extra photons — possibly 200 within the close to time period — and to reconfigure it for real-world functions, corresponding to accelerating drug improvement by precisely predicting the interactions between candidate medicine and their targets.
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