The goal of building a quantum computer is to harness the quirks of quantum physics to solve certain problems far faster than a traditional computer can. And at the heart of a quantum computer is the quantum bit, or qubit—the quantum equivalent of the 1s and 0s that underlie our digital lives.
“A qubit is the fundamental building block of quantum information science technology,” says Joseph Heremans, an electrical engineer at the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.
Traditional bits can be any sort of switch, anything that can flip from 0 to 1. But building a qubit takes something more.
“A qubit is essentially a quantum state of matter,” Heremans says. “And it has weird properties that allow you to store more information and process more information” than a traditional bit.
Those weird properties include superposition (the ability to be in a mixed state, a weighted combination of 1 and 0) and entanglement (in which multiple qubits share a common quantum state). Both might seem like they’d be hard to come by. Fortunately, nature has provided lots of options, and engineers have cooked up a couple more.
Researchers are exploring more than half a dozen ways to implement qubits, with two promising approaches currently in focus: superconducting circuits and trapped ions.
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