Oxford scientists build scalable quantum supercomputer, achieve teleportation
In a major advance towards making quantum computing a reality, researchers at Oxford University Physics have demonstrated the first ever quantum teleportation of logical gates, a press release said. The research team successfully connected two separate quantum computers over a photonic network to form a fully connected quantum computer.
Quantum computers leverage quantum mechanics to store and process information. Unlike binary computers, where the basic unit of information or bits can occupy either an ‘on’ or ‘off’ state, quantum bits (qubits) use the property of superposition, where information can exist in multiple states to carry out computations at a rate much faster than supercomputers of today.
The superior computational ability of quantum computers can help medical research, power climate change models, and solve optimization problems in many industries. This is why research institutes and private companies are working to bring this advanced computing technology to the real world.
The scalability problem
For a quantum computer to solve the challenges faced by humanity today, it needs to process a lot of information stored in many qubits. Since quantum computers work at extremely low temperatures, building a large quantum processor that can handle millions of qubits at once, would mean building a machine of immense size and an equally large cryogenic cooling infrastructure.
The researchers at Oxford University Physics attempted to solve this problem with a scalable architecture where modules can be connected to each other to build a large machine.
Each module consisted of a small number of trapped ion qubits, which were then linked together via optical fiber cable. Here, data is transmitted as photons instead of electrical signals, which allows the qubits to be entangled across modules.
Quantum teleportation of logical gates
Interesting Engineering has previously reported how quantum teleportation – transferring data from one location to another without moving qubits has been achieved using optical fiber cables. While this has involved the teleportation of states, the Oxford researchers were the first to demonstrate quantum teleportation of logical gates.
A logical gate is a building block of a computing device that can carry out a logical function. Without a logical gate, computers cannot carry out computations that are crucial for their operation.
“In our study, we use quantum teleportation to create interactions between these distant systems,” explained Dougal Main at Oxford University Physics, who was involved in the research.
“By carefully tailoring these interactions, we can perform logical quantum gates – the fundamental operations of quantum computing – between qubits housed in separate quantum computers. This breakthrough enables us to effectively’ wire together’ distinct quantum processors into a single, fully-connected quantum computer.”
The concept of such a quantum computer stems from a conventional supercomputer system where several smaller computers are connected to achieve higher computational power. For a quantum computer, this approach overcomes the scalability problem while providing the necessary environment for quantum-scale operations, which are prone to interference and errors.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach, the researchers successfully carried out Grover’s search, which attempted to find a particular item in a large unstructured dataset.
“Our experiment demonstrates that network-distributed quantum information processing is feasible with current technology,” added David Lucas, the lead scientist for the UK Quantum Computing and Simulation Hub at Oxford University Physics, in the press release.
Source: Interesting Engineering
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Oxford scientists build scalable quantum supercomputer, achieve teleportation