Quantum Computing

Quantum computation (QC) holds out tremendous promise for efficiently solving some of the most difficult problems in computational science, such as integer factorization, discrete logarithms, and quantum modeling that are intractable on any present or future conventional computer. New concepts for QC implementations, algorithms, and advances in the theoretical understanding of the physics requirements for QC appear almost weekly in the scientific literature.

This rapidly evolving field is one of the most active research areas of modern science, attracting substantial funding that supports research groups at internationally leading academic institutions, National Laboratories and major industrial research centers. Well-organized programs are underway in the United States, the European Union and its member nations, Australia, and in other major industrial nations. Start-up quantum information companies are already in operation. A diverse range of experimental approaches from a variety of scientific disciplines are pursuing different routes to meet the fundamental quantum mechanical challenges involved. Yet experimental achievements in QC, although of unprecedented complexity in basic quantum physics, are only at the proof-of-principle stage in terms of their abilities to perform QC tasks. It will be necessary to develop significantly more complex quantum-information processing (QIP) capabilities before quantum computer science issues can begin to be experimentally studied.

To realize this potential will require the engineering and control of quantummechanical systems on a scale far beyond anything yet achieved in any physics laboratory. This required control runs counter to the tendency of the essential quantum properties of quantum systems to degrade with time ("decoherence"). Yet, it is known that it should be possible to reach the "quantum computer science test-bed regime" — if challenging requirements for the precision of elementary quantum operations and physical scalability can be met. Although a considerable gap exists between these requirements and any of the experimental implementations today, this gap continues to close.

Read more - Quantum Computation (QC) Roadmap