The answer to one of the biggest questions in quantum computing might have been all around us this whole time: light. In newly published research, a team of scientists from Louisiana and Mexico say they’ve found a way to corral up to 40 viable photons of light “at room temperature under high levels of noise and decoherence,” for use in quantum information crunching. If this finding is validated by further research and implementation, it could help move quantum computing closer to real life.
The paper was recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced Science. The research starts from an understanding that quantum computing, or quantum information processing, is something fundamentally different from the paradigms we have today. The team explains in the paper how their field, reservoir computing, differs from the von Neumann setup that the vast majority of computers have now. Instead, it’s closer to a neural network, with “highly-interconnected quantum networks as reservoirs.”
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