Quantum Researchers Achieve 10-Fold Boost In Superposition Stability (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader quotes The Stack: A team of Australian researchers has developed a qubit offering ten times the stability of existing technologies. The computer scientists claim that the new innovation could significantly increase the reliability of quantum computing calculations... The new technology, developed at the University of New South Wales, has been named a 'dressed' quantum bit as it combines a single atom with an electromagnetic field. This process allows the qubit to remain in a superposition state for ten times longer than has previously been achieved. The researchers argue that this extra time in superposition could boost the performance stability of quantum computing calculations... Previously fragile and short-lived, retaining a state of superposition has been one of the major barriers to the development of quantum computing. The ability to remain in two states simultaneously is the key to scaling and strengthening the technology further.
Do you ever wonder what the world will look like when everyone has their own personal quantum computer?

Comments

of course

[TheRealMindChild]

Do you ever wonder what the world will look like when everyone has their own personal quantum computer?

It will happen around the same time I can run an economical fusion reactor

Re:of course

[sheramil]

Do you ever wonder what the world will look like when everyone has their own personal quantum computer? It will happen around the same time I can run an economical fusion reactor

... mediated by an AI, through virtual reality. i wonder what the world will look like when people stop masturabting to diegetic prototypes like they were the real thing.

Re:of course

[atherophage]

what will it look look like when everyone has a beowulf cluster of these? FTFY

Re: of course

[jtgd]

The web will be full of videos of cats.... being shot inside boxes.... or not.

Stateful Encryption Solutions

[Shane_Optima]

Could we please get to work on getting everything on the web compatible with a stateful encryption scheme (out of band preshared keys and signing schemes that aren't entirely reliant on any form[1] of asymmetric cryptography) now ? Instead of waiting 10-20 years and then suddenly finding out, oh crap, some government has finally has built a quantum computer powerful enough to crack RSA/ECC?

No? Oh well. I tried.


1. Yes yes, there are some asymmetric schemes that aren't known to be vulnerable to efficient quantum algorithms, but there will always be a buttload of lingering question marks over any scheme that doesn't involve shared secrets.

Re:Stateful Encryption Solutions

[Shane_Optima]

Preemptive clarification: There are a lot of ways to do this (and I don't claim to be an expert on this sort of thing), but one obvious way to accomplish this in a relatively painless fashion would be through heavy use of purpose-built hashing algorithms combined with symmetric encryption. Each session key would be built using material received over an encrypted connection (utilizing preshared keys abd hashing and challenge-response stuff only; no RSA) from multiple trusted key servers hashed together. In this way, the website you're talking to wouldn't be able to reconstruct any of your master keys and each trusted key server would be ignorant of the preshared key you use to communicate with the others.

There are lots of niggling details here, but I just wanted to make a quick point that a solution based solely on hashing and symmetric cryptography wouldn't imply having to set up a separate preshared key with each and every site or service you use.

Re:Stateful Encryption Solutions

[Shane_Optima]

No no, material would be provided from multiple servers and combined together with a well designed hash. You could have one server in the EU, one in the USA, one in Russia, one in Cuba and one in China if you were feeling paranoid. You would have a separate preshared key for each, and your browser settings could specify minimum number of keyservers you require to consider a connection secure. The point is all off the servers would have to be compromised bad things to happen. Such a scheme could be made to be as strong as its strongest link, not as weak as its weakest link.

I'm handwaving away some details here and there might be better ways to do this; I'm merely pointing out that it's feasible and in principle could be made to be quite robust.

Re:Stateful Encryption Solutions

[gweihir]

There is absolutely no need to do that. Quantum Computing has failed to scale in any way for the last 30 years. It will continue to do so. Now, if we could get everybody to change the damn default passwords, that would be something that would help with very serious problem.

Benchmarks

[quenda]

The team ran a benchmark on one of their quantum computers to accurately measure the new increased speed.
Unfortunately, they can no longer find the computer to repeat their test.

Mayhem

[Tablizer]

Stop! You are killing cats!

Potential dystopia

[Rick Schumann]

Do you ever wonder what the world will look like when everyone has their own personal quantum computer?

At the rate and direction we're going, it'll be a dystopian future world where you can't even take a dump in the privacy of your own home bathroom without some government spook having a terabyte of data collected from the 'event'. Of course, that being said, it's just as possible that while we'll have record amounts of surveillance and spying on everyone all the time, everyone will have access to continually morphing high-end encryption driven by their own quantum computers, creating a 'balance of power' on both sides of the equation.

Or, just maybe, we, as a race, grow out of this anal-retentive, must-watch-everyone-all-the-time, anxiety-driven, infantile stage of our social development, into a New Age of 'Live and Let Live' on all sides of all equations. Yeah, yeah, I know. Let a guy dream, will you?

qubit scalability is still unknown

[ad454]

Although this appears to be a great achievement, pending independent peer-review of course...

The fact is that that it is still a big unanswered question in physics as to how the number of qubits with superposition of their quantum states will scale in terms of time and energy. Many physicists think that this might scale scale exponentially.

So yes, we can expect to make quantum computers with a several (maybe even a few dozen) qubits with superposition of their quantum states; but if we need to double the time and energy as we add more qubits, it becomes impractical. Even if one find 10x or 100x improvements in obtaining superposition, if one does this with the large number of qubits needs to break classical public key crypto, such as RSA (via factoring), or DH/ECDH & DSA/ECDSA (via discrete log), it may take more time than the projected heat death of the universe and/or more energy than in the universe, especially with large key sizes.

Note that quantum computer systems such as those from D-Wave now have 2000 qubits, but these function without quantum superposition of their qubits, and hence cannot be used to break public key crypto. Mind you, even without superposition, D-Wave systems appear be to many times more efficient in computing some things compared to classical computers, such as for some types of simulations, so they are still useful in there own right.

Physicist should would find out how qubits scale, long before anyone is able to build one capable of breaking public key crypto. By then, there are a number of usable but less efficient (bigger & slower) quantum resistant public key alternatives which we can switch to, such as lattice based crypto, long before there is any quantum computer risk to Internet security.

In terms of science fiction risks to crypto, I am much more concerned about super-intelligent AI (or really clever human mathematicians) figuring out some shortcut to undermine trapdoor functions which public key crypto is based on, than I am with quantum computers.

And currently, the biggest risk to worry about are the countless security flaws and backdoors in modern hardware and software, such as Intel VPro/AMT, and organizations such as the NSA undermining crypto standards and protocols.

Nothing x 10: Still nothing

[gweihir]

The states are still "fragile and short-lived". This is not relevant in any way, form or shape, except as a detail result form a failed research direction. Other directions for alternate computing circuits have been scrapped far before the mountain of failure that "quantum computing" has accumulated by now.