Breakthrough for Quantum Measurement

said_captain_said_wo writes to tell us that PhysicsWeb is reporting that two teams of physicists have developed a new method for measuring the state of quantum bits in a quantum computer without disturbing the state. From the article: "In the future, the Josephson capacitance could be used for operations in a large-scale quantum computer," says Mika Sillanpaa of Helsinki University. "The Josephson inductance and Josephson capacitance together would also allow us to build new types of quantum 'band engineered' electronic devices, such as low-noise parametric amplifiers."

Comments

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

[SRA8]

Wouldnt this violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

Re:Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure

Re:Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

[Centurix]

Maybe. Maybe not, who can tell?

Re:Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

[arrrrg]

> Wouldnt this violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

Reading a qubit doesn't violate the Uncertainty Principle by itself; if qubits couldn't be read or written, they'd be worthless. The issue you are probably thinking of is that entanglements between qubits will be destroyed by the reading process (and there is no way to "read" such entanglements without destroying the individual qubit values).

Re:Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

[maxzilla]

Not neccisarily, by one quantum bit changing can be measured because it influences a number of other bits in a uniform way. I think you could imagine one gear spinning that drives a set of other gears, as the quantum bit changes it changes the whole setup of the capacitor so it is evident which way the bit was moving without changing its spin by measuring it. you change the spin of one of the bits in the capacitor, not all of the bits or the original bits

Re:Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

[BlkItlStl]

I don't think so. I'm pretty sure that has to do with limits on measuring momentum and location. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

Re:Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

[Obvius]

Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle - DxDp>=hbar/2 Or as my old prof used to say "When you've got energy, you don't have the time. And when you've got the time, you don't have the energy."

Re:Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

[arrrrg]

I should clarify: reading the qubit will destroy all quantum effects (superposition as well as entanglement), effectively making the qubits look like ordinary bits (when you open the box, the cat's either dead or alive, not both). However, quantum computers are designed with this in mind; reading the output destroys any quantum properties it may have, but a computation can be repeated many times to get an idea of what uncertainty was present in the output.

Re:Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

[Anonymous Coward]

The uncertainty principle just states that you cannot know both
the position and momentum of a particle at the same time ... in
other words you can know both but not precisely, if you know one
precisely you do not know the other ... because you have interacted
with it.

If you know that the particle is in a certain band, you do not need
to know its location ... that IS its location ... or it is essentially
trapped .... you do not care.

If you have your cow in a pasture, you do not care where it is, as
long as it is eating grass or hay in the pasture and how not escaped. ... best I can do.

Re:Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?

[Haydn Fenton]

Netcraft confirms it, Schrödingers cat is dead.

Shroedinger's cat?

[mcrbids]

Does this mean that we can find out if the cat is dead without opening the box? Sure sounds like it.

IANASPP (I Am Not A Sub-atomic Particle Physicist) but this seems to be quite a breakthrough that might save millions of subatomic cats from untimely deaths...

Anybody with some actual knowledge care to elucidate?

Re:Shroedinger's cat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean that we can find out if the cat is dead without opening the box? Sure sounds like it.

That's exatcly what it means, the way the headline presents it, which would mean that QP is disproved, which again leads me to beleive that the poster has misunderstood something.

Is quantum computing useful beyond decryption?

[jimmyhat3939]

The problem with quantum computing, as I understand it, is there are very very few applications.

Essentially, it's only useful in a situation where you need to repeatedly run the same computation over and over again with different input values to see which of those values produces a valid output.

I have a friend who has suggested repeatedly that eventually computers will contain some sort of quantum processor that helps with such tasks as gaming. I don't think this is realistic because of the serialness of the tasks that quantum computing tackles. In particular, something like rendering an environment in real-time won't be helped because there's an unpredictable input (the human).
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE

Re:Is quantum computing useful beyond decryption?

[smeek]

Quantum computing is also good for solving problems in quantum mechanics. No, really.

Re:Is quantum computing useful beyond decryption?

[Jace of Fuse!]

In particular, something like rendering an environment in real-time won't be helped because there's an unpredictable input (the human).

Durring the 1/60th (or less) of a second that your system is rendering a single frame in that game, the state of the scene and all objects (as well as light positions, textures, and overlays) is very static. It just doesn't seem like it to you, because you are very slow compared to your computer.

There could be hundreds of applications of a Quantum Co-Processor in a game, from testing for occlusion in a 3D scene, to making AI decisions in computer controlled characters.

Quantum Computing may very well not be immediately useful in many traditional computation tasks ("While this value is true then do that") but it will open up whole new ways of tackling processes that are time consuming with today's methods ("do any of these things give us this, that, or something in between?").

Just thinking about it gives me that Fuzzy Logic Feeling...

no fair

[FidelCatsro]

You changed the state of the quantum bits by measuring them

Implications in reverse order

[Flying pig]

Talk about looking for grant funding! Problem is, scientific illiterates in Government etc. think they understand what a quantum computer can do (application a long way in the future if at all) but not what you can do with very low noise parametric amplifiers (which might be relatively near term applications.) In terms of exciting progress in studies of brain function, small scale biochemistry, remote sensing and signal processing, very low noise amplifiers are critical components, whereas quantum computers don't yet exist, and by the time they do conventional computers should be adequate to deal with a lot of the data processing.

Not to knock the discovery, which is very interesting, but it's a pity quantum computers have to be dragged into everything to justify research. I doubt that Tom's Hardware will be reviewing millikelvin coolers for your qubit box any time in the next 20 years (though I'd like to be proved wrong)

Physicist in the House

[anomalousman]

They can do what they say, but it's a lot more trivial than measuring the entire quantum state of the system, which is, as others have suggested above, impossible.

The Heisenberg Unccertainty principle implies that measuring a quantity must add noise in the conjugate quantity. For example, measuring the momentum of an object spreads out the wavefunction. Another example, measuring the state of a qubit (whether it is a zero or a one) destroys the relative phase between the zero and the one.

So the "non-destructive" measurement they are talking about means that they aren't changing it from a zero to a one or vice-versa. But they are (and must) destroy the information about the phase of the qubit state during the measurement. For a more in-depth discussion, look up "quantum nondemolition measurements".

Credit where it's due.

[kimmop]

The article isn't totally clear about it but the Finnish university in question is the Helsinki University of Technology (in the city of Espoo) and not the University of Helsinki. These are the largest two universities in Finland and both have Physics departments so the distinction is important.

Crap!

[werewolf1031]

I changed the article by reading it! Someone tell me what it says now...?

Re:Crap!

[$RANDOMLUSER]

"I changed the article by reading it" is a terrific joke.

"The author changed the article by writing it" may be the best analogy to quantum computing I've run into. At the moment he finished the article, the author caused the article to collapse from all the articles it might have been the the article it actually was. As he was writing it, it simultaneously passed through all the possible articles (states) it might have been, to become the final article (state). Becoming is infinite, being is finite.

Re:Unchanged State

[quoll]

The article seems misleading in its wording. It says "read the value of a qubit without changing its value." This can't mean that it doesn't change the original quantum value, as this makes no sense. Reading a quantum value (a qubit) collapses the probability to the value read, by definition. This means that the value is no longer quantum. The original probability function cannot be read (though it can be calculated).

The statement without changing its value must refer to reading the value reliably. When reading the state of an individual subatomic particle it is extremely easy to have the result perturbed by noise. Given that there is a probability of reading an alternative value, then it is not normally possible to tell when the wrong value was read. It appears that this makes the process much more reliable.

IAAQP (I Am A Quantum Physicist). Though I could still learn a thing or two about subatomic physics.

Some corrections

[Catullus]

Quantum computers are not known to be very good at solving NP-complete problems, and in fact it is considered very unlikely that they will be able to solve such problems efficiently. Grover's algorithm provides a square-root speed-up in solving any problem in NP; however, this is not enough to make an unfeasible problem feasible, and for any given NP-complete problem, there is likely to be a classical algorithm that outperforms this "brute force" approach.

Grover's algorithm is only the provably best implementation in a "black box" setting, which is unrealistic for many problems.

Finally, quantum computers are not known to be able to do anything useful for protein folding - this would be an application of an efficient quantum algorithm for the graph isomorphism problem, which nobody has come up with yet...

Re:spooky action at a distance

[gauge boson]

presumably, given entanglement [wikipedia.org], measurement of qbit state allows potentially for instant communication ?

No, it doesn't. The closest you can come is instant synchronization of states, but you don't get to choose what state that is. For example, you can have two particles entangled to have the same (or opposite, as in the EPR thought experiment) spin orientation, but you can't send a signal from one to the other by choosing the orientation. Instead, it's random whether each one is spin up or spin down - the only guarantee is the relationship between the measurements. This would be great for things like cryptographic key exchange, since you can't have a man-in-the-middle attack if there is no middle, but it's useless for sending information. See: The No-Communication Theorem (warning: requires crazy math skills to avoid the MEGO effect)

nothing can travel faster than light.

I call bullshit. Relativity prohibits* local superluminal motion; non-locally, it's fair game. See, for example, the Alcubierre Warp Drive - the only question of whether it's possible or not (aside from new physics) rests on whether there's any local superluminal energy propagation at the edge of the spacetime bubble. Plus, QM allows for lots more in the way of non-local effects (even if you assume hidden variables, since Bell's Theorem rules out local hidden variables based on current experimental results), though, as I noted above, it still doesn't allow for superluminal communication (or teleportation, for that matter).

* Minor caveat: this is not counting tachyons, since nobody knows if they exist.

Helsinki U. of Tech., not Helsinki U.

[msmikkol]

Just a minor correction to the linked article: Mika Sillanpää worked at the Helsinki University of Technology, not at the Helsinki University when he wrote the paper in question.

Because it isn't an insulator, of course

[Flying pig]

The description of the Josephson Junction is aimed at all the non-physicists out there. The "insulating layer" is a bandgap layer. The point is that cooper paired electrons can tunnel through it, i.e. it acts as a superconductor itself. It is an insulator for ordinary electrons only. And the definition of capacitor is nothing at all to do with physical conductors or insulators. It is a region of space where a potential gradient can be created, and the capacitance is the measure of how much energy has to be pumped into the region in order to create a given potential gradient. "Empty space" requires the lowest energy and has the lowest capacitance per unit volume, while certain ceramics with relatively mobile but limited electrons have very high values. If you cannot create a potential difference across your region of space, you have no capacitance - and at first sight, if that region is superconducting you cannot have a potential difference.

Probabilistic computing?

[Urusai]

Or aleatory computing? I realize there are certain problems that are deterministically intractable but with feasible probabilistic "solutions", but statistics based computing is just...dirty. I don't think a lot of people understand that quantum computing doesn't actually provide hard answers, that you have to run the same "algorithm" a lot of times to get an approximation.