It seems that work and life is conspiring to leave me no time to finish my write-up on my General Fusion visit. Started it weeks ago but still I am not ready to hit the publish button on this piece.
In the meantime I highly recommend the following blog that I came across. It covers very similar topics than the ones here, and also shares a similar outlook. For instance, this article beautifully sums up why I never warmed up to Everett’s Multiverse interpretation (although I have to admit reading Julian Barbour’s End of Time
The ‘Fun Is Real’ blog is a cornucopia of good physics writing and should provide many hours of thought-provoking reading material to bridge over the dearth of my current posting schedule.
On a side note, given that this goes to the core of the topic I write about on this blog, the following news should not go unmentioned: Australian researchers reportedly have created a cluster state of 10,000 entangled photonic qubits (h/t Raptis T.).
This is magnitudes more than has been previously reported. Now if they were to manage to get some quantum gates applied to them we’d be getting somewhere.
Henning: I don’t see much difference between the above “Australian Researchers'” paper and the following article from Oxford University!. Please enlighten me!.
http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2011/112001.html
Sol, thanks for bringing this to my attention, haven’t seen this research. Unfortunately the summary is terrible. Talking about bits when qubits are the issue? Pretty egregious when considering that this is a press release directly from the university. I’ve seen plenty badly written academic press releases but this one takes the cake.
Will have to go to the actual research paper to figure out what they’ve been doing. The only obvious difference is that it will be more ‘straightforward’ to apply quantum gates to entangled photons than to spin states that are locked up in a solid.
Anyhow, if I had to guess, I’d say they entangled the electrons’ spins with their respective nucleus spin for each of about 10 billion atoms. If that’s the case it’s a neat experiment, but nothing to write home about when concerned with getting a working QC out of this anytime soon.
Just to make this clearer the research I linked to claims a huge qubit cluster state.
Henning, thanks for checking out my website and for the advertisement! I haven’t commented very much specifically on quantum computing. But it is such a fascinating (and challenging) field with incredible potential. I do think that some of the foundational issues I discuss will have to be resolved before we realize the full potential of quantum computing.
Warren
There is a somewhat tongue in cheek quip that Quantum Computing researchers like to tell: “If we can build scalable quantum computers that’s great, if we can’t it means we have found a flaw in quantum mechanics, and that’ll be even more exciting.”
Personally, I believe that the linear non-relativistic QM is not the full story, but its domain of applicability is staggeringly huge. This view is informed by a little known equation system, that Steven Weinberg originally came up with, to test exactly this questions – are there non-linear limits where our QM breaks down? To that end he created non-linear deformed toy “Schroedinger equations”, and his conclusion was that within the precision of all know experimental data (at the time) linear QM holds. He just overlooked an intriguing aspect, one that Australian physicist Kingsley Jones who independently played with an equivalent equation system noticed. One of these ‘toy’ wave dynamics fully contains Hamiltonian mechanics. He tells his anecdote of how he broke this news to Weinberg in this older post.
The link to the Wikipedia article in this old post no longer works as the Wikipolice deleted it, but I copied it here.
Henning: Keep an eye on the announcement to come this week, as outlined in the following Globe and Mail article, which sounds like, perhaps, the biggest breakthrough in the field of universal quantum computing, at least to my understanding of it!. If true, it will change the whole field of universal quantum computing.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/tech-news/quantum-chip-breakthrough-to-unleash-ultra-fast-computing/article4516380/
Thank you! I included the Bristol research in my QC taxonomy chart from a while back. As you can see I expected them to take quite a bit more time. Will be interesting to see what they have.
In the past they had a tendency to over-hype, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the article conflates market ready quantum cryptography with not so market ready quantum computing. We should soon know more. Will certainly keep an eye on this.