An international team of scientists from Australia, Japan and the United States has produced a prototype of a large-scale quantum processor made of laser light.
Based on a design ten years in the making, the processor has built-in scalability that allows the number of quantum components -- made out of light -- to scale to extreme numbers. The research was published in Science today.
Quantum computers promise fast solutions to hard problems, but to do this they require a large number of quantum components and must be relatively error free. Current quantum processors are still small and prone to errors. This new design provides an alternative solution, using light, to reach the scale required to eventually outperform classical computers on important problems.
"While today's quantum processors are impressive, it isn't clear if the current designs can be scaled up to extremely large sizes," notes Dr Nicolas Menicucci, Chief Investigator at the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
"Our approach starts with extreme scalability -- built in from the very beginning -- because the processor, called a cluster state, is made out of light."
To read more, click here.