VIENNA, Austria — Quantum computing just took a big step forward thanks to a scientific breakthrough involving just one laser. Researchers in A

Quantum computers take major step forward thanks to simplified laser beam trick

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2024-04-24 11:30:10

VIENNA, Austria — Quantum computing just took a big step forward thanks to a scientific breakthrough involving just one laser. Researchers in Austria are now able to perform complex quantum calculations with a single beam of light — setting up the next leap forward for these ultra-fast computers.

Quantum computers promise to vastly outperform classical computers for certain cutting-edge applications like modeling quantum physics, cryptography, and machine learning. However, building large-scale universal quantum computers has proven to be an immense challenge for engineers.

The key to quantum computing is taking advantage of some mind-bending quantum phenomena like superposition and entanglement. In quantum superposition, tiny particles can exist in a mixture of multiple states at once, unlike our everyday classical intuition, where an object exists in just one state. For an everyday computer, that choice is binary — 1 or 0. Moreover, quantum particles can exhibit strange correlations called entanglement, where their states remain interconnected even across vast distances.

Most current experimental quantum computers use individual photons (particles of light) as the quantum information carriers. The photons are typically encoded into different degrees of freedom like their polarization direction or their spatial mode or path. Interfering with these specially prepared quantum states of photons allows sampling from probability distributions that are hard for classical computers to calculate.