Harnessing the unique features of the quantum world promises a dramatic speed-up in information processing as compared to the fastest classical machines. Scientists from the Group of Philip Walther from the Faculty of Physics, University of Vienna succeeded in prototyping a new and highly resource efficient model of a quantum computer -- the boson sampling computer.
The results will be published in the upcoming issue of the scientific journal Nature Photonics.
Quantum computers work by manipulating quantum objects as, for example, individual photons, electrons or atoms and by harnessing the unique quantum features. Not only do quantum computers promise a dramatic increase in speed over classical computers in a variety of computational tasks; they are designed to complete tasks that even a supercomputer would not be able to handle. Although, in recent years, there has been a rapid development in quantum technology the realization of a full-sized quantum computer is still very challenging. While it is still an exciting open question which architecture and quantum objects will finally lead to the outperformance of conventional supercomputers, current experiments show that some quantum objects are better suited than others for particular computational tasks.
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