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First 'Quantum Computer Chips' Demonstrated
holy_calamity writes "The first quantum computer chips have been made by two US groups, New Scientist reports. Both NIST and Yale have demonstrated chips where information was transferred between two superconducting qubits using a 'quantum bus'. The bus is made from a cavity that traps a single microwave photon as a standing wave — the NIST group also managed to use the bus to store data from one qubit for a short time. 'After encoding information in one qubit, they transferred it into the cavity for 10 nanoseconds before transferring it to the other qubit. Yale's chip used qubits around 1-micron square built on silicon, while NIST used larger 10-square-micron qubits on top of sapphire. In both prototypes, the bus between the qubits was between five and seven millimeters long.'"
# "And anyone who thinks they can talk about quantum theory without feeling stinky hasn't yet understood the first thing about smell."
# "If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet."
--Neils Bohr
This has got to be an awesome project to work on...I'm jealous.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
Well, there's always one time pads...
If encryption doesn't scale better than decryption, then there is a problem, since then (at best) someone with K times your processing power (for some value of K that is independent of key size) will be able to decrypt your transmission as easily as you encrypt it, no matter how many bits you use for the key.
Why is it things like this never have pictures? I wanna see pictures. Its no fun to read about things that you don't (quite) understand unless you can ooh and ahh at pictures while you pretend to understand. Then you can point at your screen and say "See? Its THAT piece. That's what makes it work. Its the, err.. umm, thing that makes it work!"
Problem with one time pads is that you have to have a way to securely transmit the pad.
-Bucky
The one time pad, where the key length = message length is still safe as long as you never reuse the key. (the "one time" in one time pad.
As simple proof of this is that for any encrypted text of length N, there exists a key also of length N that will decrypt the etext to any plain text of length N. Therefore there is no way for an attacker to determine if an attempted key is valid or not. There if an attacker were to try every single key of length N, which is possible on some super large future quantum computer, all he will get out is every single decryption of length N, with no way to determine which is correct.
Suppose the plain text was "attack at dawn" and the etext was "xbdhgfhwteriur". After the attacker used his q-computer he'd have "attack at dawn", "attach at noon" and "attack at fred", along with 64 quintillion other combinations.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Yes, because new things should have existing applications. They're new, they enable new. It might not have applicability now, but it might do when google offloads your search to a qbit coprocessor.
It's a good thing Tesla didn't feel the same way about A/C electricity.
The funky thing about fundamental and 'useless' physics research is that from time to time extremely interesting things come out of it.
Imagine if people could produce things as hard as diamond as easily and costless as they produce things of metal today. But that the material you use is rather a random pile of wood chips rather than ore mined out of the ground. Without fundamental research it is never ever going to happen, with it - it's more likely to than not.