Innovations & technologies

AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT KIND OF QUANTUM COMPUTER

It is no accident that quantum computing is being undertaken by some of the biggest IT companies in the world. Google, IBM, and Intel in particular have the capacity to devote a lot of resources to their respective efforts, and all of them demonstrated impressive progress over the past few years. And even though we’ve devoted a lot of our coverage of quantum computing to these three key players, it’s still much too early to tell which companies will come to dominate this nascent market.

That’s mainly because, as of yet, there is no real consensus on which technological approach will be able make universal quantum computing commercially viable. That said, IBM, Google, and Intel, as well as Rigetti are all building various kinds of solid-state quantum processors. While this approach builds on decades of experience with silicon-based semiconductors and large-scale integrating, this technology demands cooling the chips to near absolute zero and employing aggressive error correction techniques to keep the qubits behaving properly.

A notable exception to this solid-state approach is being pursued by a started named IonQ, which is using trapped ions for its qubits using ytterbium atoms suspended in a vacuum. Here, processing is accomplished with the use of laser beams, which are applied to the atomic qubits to store and retrieve information, perform logical operations, and link them together into specific circuits. In a recent conversation with IonQ CEO and cofounder Chris Monroe, he told us why he believes this approach has the best chance of making the leap into commercial quantum computing.