The path to is complicated by a fairy tale challenge – how do you carry a cloud without changing its shape? The potential solution sounds almost as fantastical as the problem. You could guide the cloud to dance as it travels, to the beat of a unique material known as a . Krzysztof Giergiel and Krzysztof Sacha from Jagiellonian University in Poland and Peter Hannaford from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia propose a novel kind of 'time' circuit might be up to the task of preserving the nebulous states of qubits as they're carried through tempests of quantum logic.
Unlike descriptions of objects as having clearly defined locations and movements, of the same particle describes features like its position, momentum, and spin as a blur of likelihoods. This 'cloud' of possibilities is best understood in isolation. Once the its spread of possibilities changes like the odds of a runner winning the 100-meter sprint at the Olympics, until finally only one outcome is observed.
Just as a classical computer can use the binary states of particles as 'on-off' switches in logic gates, can theoretically exploit the spread of uncertainties in a particle to , many of which would be impractical or even impossible to solve the old-fashioned way. The challenge lies in preserving the coherence of that quantum cloud of possibility – referred to as a qubit – . With every bump, , comes an increased risk of errors that ruin the number-crunching process.
Practical quantum computers re.
