Late last year, tech giant Microsoft hired a handful of quantum physicists, including one from the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in The Netherlands, to help build a prototype quantum computer – a machine that would harness the bizarre behavior of matter at extremely small scales to solve some of the hardest problems in science. (See sidebar: What is a quantum computer?) Other companies are also working to commercialize quantum computers. IBM plans to have a commercially available quantum processor in the cloud within a few years. Intel, Google and smaller start-ups developing similarly powerful devices are beginning to transform their quantum-computing plans into reality.
If one of these teams of physicists and engineers wins the race to build the world’s first quantum computer, it would outcompute classical computers by a long shot and help tackle currently unsolvable problems in fields ranging from finance to cybersecurity, and from drug development to quantum physics itself.
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