A Component Called a Pulse Tube
From the outside, quantum computers look like enormous black monoliths, giant metal boxes about 10 feet wide and 12 feet tall. They’re powered internally by a fridge, a refrigerator that chills the chips to nearly absolute zero. It’s literally hundreds of times colder than the vast interstellar space. This is amongst the coldest and extreme conditions that humans have managed to create. These fridges have a component called a pulse tube. It emits a sound about once per second which sounds eerily similar to a heartbeat. Standing next to one of these machines is truly mesmerizing. And at the heart of this giant box is a tiny chip about the size of your thumbnail. This chip carries all the wonder and magic that makes this machine operate.
A Tiny Element Called Qubit
We won’t delve into the mathematical details of how it all works, but we will offer a roundabout way of understanding this. Imagine that parallel universes do exist, so you have two universes that are exactly identical in every aspect, from the vast horizon to the tiniest atomic detail, but with only one difference. And that difference lies in the value of a tiny element called qubit. A qubit is somewhat like a transistor in a classical computer. It has two distinct physical states which we label as zero and one. In a regular computer, these states are mutually exclusive. That means the device can either be one or the other, and never anything else.
Quantum Algorithms Take Advantage of The Entanglement and Parallelism
But in a quantum computer, this device can be in a strange situation where these two parallel universes have an axis point. As you increase the number of these devices, every added qubit doubles the number of accessible parallel universes. So, when you have a chip like this with about 500 of these bits, you have something like 2 to the 500th power of these parallel universes existing within that chip. We can think of it as the shadows of these parallel worlds overlapping with ours. If we’re smart enough, we can dive into them and bring them back to our world to make an effect. Quantum algorithms take advantage of the entanglement and parallelism of qubits. This gives them a considerable edge over traditional algorithms for specific problem domains.
Quantum Computing Similar to Moore’s Law
They also get information from qubits at the end of a calculation, but this presents a unique challenge. When you measure qubits, they collapse into a single state which eliminates their superposition and entanglement. So, quantum algorithms use advanced techniques to draw meaningful results from measurements before this collapse happens, which would then maximize the benefits of computation. And in fact, we have a trend in quantum computing similar to Moore’s Law. The number of qubits on a chip has doubled every year for the last nine years. If you put it on a chart, you can actually see where certain technologies kicked in where people were ahead of the game or behind the eight ball and lost out by simply looking at Moore’s Law.
Quantum Teleportation Needs Quantum Entanglement
This exponential growth opens up unprecedented capabilities not just in the realm of processing speed, but also in the exploration of fundamental quantum phenomena. Such a strange quantum phenomenon has truly exemplified the potential of this. It’s called quantum teleportation. Back in 1999, Isaac chuang and his team at IBM successfully implemented the quantum teleportation protocol. It is a technique for transferring quantum information from one place to another remotely using entanglement. But what does that really mean? can we teleport people like we’ve seen in Star Trek? In principle, quantum teleportation needs quantum entanglement to ensure that the state of one particle is instantly transferred to another no matter the distance. So, the particle itself doesn’t travel, only its state or information.
Process Of Teleportation
This idea was first put forward by six scientists. One of them being Charles Bennett in 1993. Isaac Chuang put this theory into practice just six years later, but you might ask why do we even need this special process? why can’t we just copy things like we do on regular computers? Let’s demonstrate how it might work. Imagine you’re trying to teleport a baseball from California to New York. So first, you entangle two baseball particles in California. This allows for information sharing, but it’s not teleportation yet. Next, you measure one particle producing two bits of data, and making the baseball disappear from California. You send these bits to New York at the speed of light, say via fiber optics.
Process Of Teleportation with Example
Once there, these bits help recreate the baseball. And that’s it! The baseball’s information has moved from California to New York without being duplicated. Even so, scientists still have a lot to figure out. Two big issues are how to keep quantum information safe when we create entanglement, and secondly how to send quantum bits over long distances without losing any data. We do expect to be able to teleport molecules, maybe water carbon dioxide, maybe even DNA, maybe organic molecules.
Now, to teleport a human raises all the ethical questions because the original, first of all, has to be destroyed in the process of quantum teleportation. With quantum entanglement, your message is linked to another one, and can change the other message instantly no matter how far apart they are. So, when someone tries to intercept this transmission, they would mess up the quantum state of the particles, and we would immediately spot it. It’s a big step forward for keeping information safe in the world of quantum computing. Before we dive into what artificial intelligence and quantum computers can achieve, let’s first explore the brief history of quantum physics.
By
Dr. Abid Hussain Nawaz, Ph.D. & Post Doc
Zeenat Mushtaque, Master of philosophy in Solid State Physics
