Google Moves Closer to a Universal Quantum Computer

Nature (06/08/16) Philip Ball

A research team has made an experimental prototype of a universal quantum computer that can solve a wide range of problems in fields such as chemistry and physics, and has the potential to be scaled up to larger systems. The Google prototype combines the best of analog and digital approaches to quantum computing. Google computer scientists and physicists at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara) and the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, used a row of nine solid-state quantum bits (qubits) fashioned from cross-shaped films of aluminum about 400 micrometers from tip to tip, deposited them onto a sapphire surface, and cooled the metal to turn it into a superconductor with no electrical resistance. Information could be encoded into the qubits in their superconducting state, and interactions between neighboring qubits were controlled by logic gates that steer the qubits digitally into a state that encodes the solution to a problem. The researchers say their approach should enable a computer with quantum error correction, and they predict devices with more than 40 qubits could be a reality in a couple of years. “At that point, it will become possible to simulate quantum dynamics that is inaccessible on classical hardware, which will mark the advent of ‘quantum supremacy,'” says UC Santa Barbara’s Daniel Lidar.

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