PC Magazine - USA (2020-11)

WILL QUANTUM COMPUTING EVER MATTER OUTSIDE THE LAB?
Judging from the standpoint of the past three years of breakneck quantum
advances, waiting decades for the next great leap in quantum information
technology seems like an eternity. But progress is relative. More than a century
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tubes and the advanced semiconductor-fabrication techniques that make it
possible for a postage-stamp-sized A12 Bionic to power an Apple iPhone. And
the internet existed as a rudimentary Department of Defense project decades
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might hold.

David Aschwalom is a physicist at the University of Chicago, the director of
Argonne’s quantum test loop project, and the lead author of the background
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quantum information research is roughly equivalent to 1950’s-era classical
computers with a few dozen transistors (modern laptop computers have billions
of transistors). But he points out that the equivalent quantum machines, those
with a few dozen qubits, “scale in a way that’s highly non-linear.” By the time
someone invents a quantum computer with around 200 qubits, we’ll be able to
process algorithms with more states than there are atoms in the observable
universe, Aschwalom says.

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David Awschalom,

a physicist at

University of Chicago

and Argonne National

Laboratory, reviews

data from a quantum

experiment.