First Quantum Byte Created

gila_monster writes "Juice Enews Daily is reporting that the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the University of Innsbruck in Austria has created an entanglement of eight quantum particles, yielding a quantum byte or 'qubyte,' or eight qubits. The formal paper was published in the December 1 issue of Nature. A qubyte with eight ions provides a computing matrix of 65536 mostly independent elements. No word in the article about whether they were able to actually use the qubyte for computing."

Comments

Quantum bytes still decryptable?

[LiquidCoooled]

Wasn't there some news recently that the so called quantum bits could be read without disturbing their state.
Which would either break quantum theory, or would mean they are just fabricated bits of information and not quantum bits at all.

The article was here

Re:Quantum bytes still decryptable?

[LiquidCoooled]

Doesn't Quantum theory say you cannot read the state without disturbing the state?
The act of finding the state of a quantum bit collapses the quantum wave and obtains a result, ie you can find out what the value is now, but that may disturb what the value was going to be leading to possibly incorrect answers.

Qubits as described by modern phsyical science do not sound like true theoretical quantum bits and just sound more like tiny transistors.

Que?

[Rhinobird]

A qubyte with eight ions provides a computing matrix of 65536 mostly independent elements.

Wouldn't a qubyte just provide an indeteminate number of somewhere between 0 and 255 zombie cats?

Seriously, how do they get a 16 bit number out of an 8 bit qubyte?

Re:Que?

[milimetric]

I've read the posts here and I can point you to one source that I know is accurate, easy to understand and in my opinion beautiful:

N. David Mermin

This man is a genius. He can also explain his genius which makes him quite unique. I took a class of his and actually understood some stuff. His basic goal is to explain quantum computation to CS students. More on topic, here's the skinny on qubits:

Chapter 1 of his intro class

I really wouldn't do justice to the ease with which he explains things to attempt to summarize, but hey, what's slashdot for:

Basically skip ahead to part C if you want to jump right into it. It helps if you think of Classical bits as vectors in a two dimensional space. (0,1) and (1,0) would represent 0 and 1 as we normally think about them. So then think about Quantum bits (qubits) as (a,b) which is just a superposition of the two classical bits with amplitudes a and b which are complex scalars. The only condition is that the qubit is a unit vector in two dimensional complex vector space, or in short |a|^2 + |b|^2 = 1. Now more to the point of this thread, if you go to section 1..62 you can see that n qubits make up a computational basis (or classical basis). So, the answer is, there's not really anything like simple 0,1 states for qubits. The truth is more complicated but once you start looking at how to take advantage of qubits, a lot more beautiful in my oppinion.

Getting there...

[meringuoid]

... Eight qubits? ISTR that Shor's original quantum error correction code requires nine, and there are simpler codes requiring fewer. We're getting here into a scale where some very interesting features of quantum computation can be demonstrated.

Why eight?

[pubjames]

Why did they choose eight 'bits' for their quantum 'byte'? For historical reasons, or is there a logical reason to choose eight? Why not seven, or 42?

I'm not being entirely frivolous - I understand quantum computing is radically different from today's architectures and so don't understand why they are choosing a byte size based on what seems to me to be historical factors.