Beyond Bits: The Future of Quantum Information Processing
New Post has been published on http://www.newsnish.com/technology/beyond-bits-the-future-of-quantum-information-processing/
Beyond Bits: The Future of Quantum Information Processing
Quantum physics offers powerful methods of encoding and manipulating information such as provably secure key distribution for cryptography, rapid integer factoring, and quantum simulation.
Recently, physicists and computer scientists have realized that not only do our ideas about computing
rest on only partly accurate principles, but they miss out on a whole class of computation. Quantum physics offers powerful methods of encoding and manipulat-ing information that are not possible within a classical framework. The potential applications of these quantum information processing methods include provably secure key distribution for cryptography, rapid integer factoring, and quantum simulation.
Information theory and quantum theory were among the most significant conceptual revolutions of
the 20th century. Understanding of these theories led to the century’s major technological advances. In the 21st century, we expect to see these theories unite to form an even more powerful force quantum information theory.
Throughout the history of computing, the bit has remained the basic computational unit of information.
Quantum mechanics enables the encoding of information in quantum bits (qubits). Unlike a classical bit,
which can store only a single value—either 0 or 1—a qubit can store both 0 and 1 at the same time.
Furthermore, a quantum register of 64 qubits can store 264 values at once. Quantum computers can perform computations on all these values at the same time.
However, extracting the results of these massive parallel computations has proved tricky, limiting the
number of applications that have shown significant speed increases over classical computing. Classical parallelism can also increase the number of values handled simultaneously, but long before reaching the
amount of parallelism achievable by a quantum computer, a classical system runs out of space. For classical systems, the amount of parallelism increases in direct proportion to system size; for quantum systems, it increases exponentially with size, as illustrated in Quantum systems can operate in entangled states