A new kind of computer that will look like toys is being developed by scientists from Santa Barbara, Calif., to Hefei, China.
Harnessing the mysterious powers of quantum mechanics, the technology will perform tasks in minutes that even supercomputers could not complete in thousands of years. An experimental quantum computer was unveiled in the fall of 2019. A lab in China did the same thing.
Without help from another technological breakthrough, quantum computing will not reach its potential. A computer network that can send quantum information between machines is called a quantum internet.
A team of physicists at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have taken a significant step towards a computer network of the future. This is now possible with more than two.
Ronald Hanson, the physicist who oversees the team, said that the experiment indicates that scientists can stretch a quantum network across an increasingly large number of sites.
Their research shows the power of a phenomenon that Albert Einstein once thought impossible. He said that quantum teleportation can transfer information between locations without actually moving the physical matter that holds it.
This technology could change the way data travels. The field of physics that governs the subatomic realm and behaves unlike anything we experience in our everyday lives is the subject of more than a century of research. It's possible to move data between quantum computers in such a way that no one can intercept it.
Tracy Eleanor Northup, a researcher at the University of Innsbruck's Institute for Experimental Physics, said that the quantum computer can solve your problem, but it doesn't know what the problem is. You are running on a server that is owned by Google.
If an object is very small or very cold, a quantum computer can look at how it behaves. A single object can behave like two separate objects.
Traditional computers process information by holding either a 1 or a 0. A quantum bit, or qubit, can store a combination of 1 and 0, like a spinning coin, which can hold the possibility that it will turn up either heads or tails when it finally falls flat on the table.
Two qubits can hold four values at once, three qubits can hold eight, four can hold 16 and so on. A quantum computer becomes more powerful as the number of qubits increases.
Researchers think these devices could one day speed the creation of new medicines, power advances in artificial intelligence and crack the encryption that protects computers vital to national security. Billions of dollars are being spent across the globe on exploring the technology.
Scientists call it quantum supremacy, because it meant that the machine could perform an experiment that was impossible with traditional computers. Several more years will pass before a quantum computer can do something useful that you can't do with another machine, according to most experts.
If you read information from the qubit, it becomes an ordinary bit that can hold a 0 or a 1 but not both. Scientists hope to build machines that are both powerful and practical by stringing many qubits together.
Cloud computing services from the likes of Amazon make it easy to use processing power from anywhere, so it would be ideal if these were joined into networks that could send information between each other.
This has its own problems. Because of decoherence, quantum information cannot be copied and sent across a traditional network. There is an alternative to quantum teleportation.
A change in the state of one quantum system affects the state of another.
Dr. Northup said that it is no longer possible to describe these states individually.
The entangled systems could be particles of light or electrons. In the Netherlands, Dr. Hanson and his team used a small empty space in a synthetic diamond to trap electrons.
Three quantum systems, named Alice, Bob and Charlie, were connected to a line with strands of optical fiber by the team. The scientists could entangle these systems by sending individual particles of light between them.
Two electrons were entangled by the researchers, one belonging to Alice and the other to Bob. The electrons were given the same spin, and thus were joined, or entangled, in a common quantum state, each storing the same information: a particular combination of 1 and 0.
Bob's synthetic diamond could be used to transfer the quantum state to another qubit. Researchers could entangle Bob's electron with one belonging to Charlie.
The researchers could glue the twoentanglements together by performing a specific quantum operation on both of Bob's qubits.
The result was that data could be sent across all three nodes.
Information can be fed into one side of the connection and then appear on the other side.
The information can't be monitored. A future quantum internet could provide a new type of encryption that is theoretically unbreakable.
In the new experiment, the network nodes were only about 60 feet away. Experiments have shown that quantum systems can be entangled.
After several more years of research, the hope is that quantum teleportation will be viable across many miles.
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