The 21st-century fervor about building the first industrial-scale quantum computer, pioneering theoretical physicist Peter Zoller says, is akin to the 20th-century obsession with becoming the first to conquer Mount Everest. “When you’re climbing, you look around worrying, ‘Who is number one?’” he says. “When you reach the top, that’s when you ask yourself, ‘Why the hell did we actually do this?’”
In 1995 Zoller and Ignacio Cirac, then a postdoctoral researcher in Zoller’s group at the University of Colorado Boulder, proposed the first realistic blueprints for a quantum computer. Their idea was to use trapped ions as “qubits”—the quantum equivalent of digital bits, able to exist in a superposition that simultaneously represents 0, 1 and all positions in between. More than a decade earlier physicists Paul Benioff and Richard Feynman had independently suggested that machines harnessing the quantum realm’s weirdness could, in theory, outperform classical computers at some tasks.
Today teams around the world are developing ever bigger quantum processors using qubits made from ions, neutral atoms, superconducting loops, and more. IBM and Berkeley, Calif.–based company Atom Computing currently lead the charge with quantum computers hosting more than 1,000 qubits, and last year a research group at the California Institute of Technology reported that it had built a record-breaking array of more than 6,000 qubits.
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