Michel H. Devoret was one of three physicists who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for a series of experiments they conducted more than four decades ago.
As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1980s, Dr. Devoret helped show that the strange and powerful properties of quantum mechanics — the physics of the subatomic realm — could also be observed in electrical circuits large enough to be seen with the naked eye.
On Wednesday, Dr. Devoret and his colleagues at a Google lab near Santa Barbara, Calif., said their quantum computer had successfully run a new algorithm capable of accelerating advances in drug discovery, the design of new building materials and other fields.
Leveraging the counterintuitive powers of quantum mechanics, Google’s machine ran this algorithm 13,000 times as fast as a top supercomputer executing similar code in the realm of classical physics, according to a paper written by the Google researchers in the scientific journal Nature. (...)
Inside a classical computer like a laptop or a smartphone, silicon chips store numbers as “bits” of information. Each bit holds either a 1 or a 0. The chips then perform calculations by manipulating these bits — adding them, multiplying them and so on.
A quantum computer, by contrast, performs calculations in ways that defy common sense.
According to the laws of quantum mechanics — the physics of very small things — a single object can behave like two separate objects at the same time. By exploiting this strange phenomenon, scientists can build quantum bits, or “qubits,” that hold a combination of 1 and 0 at the same time.
This means that as the number of qubits grows, a quantum computer becomes exponentially more powerful. (...)
Google announced last year that it had built a quantum computer that needed less than five minutes to perform a particularly complex mathematical calculation in a test designed to gauge the progress of the technology. One of the world’s most powerful non-quantum supercomputers would not have been able to complete it in 10 septillion years, a length of time that exceeds the age of the known universe by billions of trillions of years.
A quantum computer, by contrast, performs calculations in ways that defy common sense.
According to the laws of quantum mechanics — the physics of very small things — a single object can behave like two separate objects at the same time. By exploiting this strange phenomenon, scientists can build quantum bits, or “qubits,” that hold a combination of 1 and 0 at the same time.
This means that as the number of qubits grows, a quantum computer becomes exponentially more powerful. (...)
Google announced last year that it had built a quantum computer that needed less than five minutes to perform a particularly complex mathematical calculation in a test designed to gauge the progress of the technology. One of the world’s most powerful non-quantum supercomputers would not have been able to complete it in 10 septillion years, a length of time that exceeds the age of the known universe by billions of trillions of years.
by Cade Metz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Adam Amengual
