Quantum Computing

Anatom with swirling orbiting electrons and force lines Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Super-fast but weird computing

Reality is weird, very weird. The first thing you have to do to understand the reality of reality is to drop your common sense. Only then can you start to understand it especially when it comes to the quantum world of the very small. Our brains evolved to naturally make sense of human scale things, rather than the very large or very small. Accept the weirdness, though, and there are lots of opportunities, especially for computer scientists. That is why it is now an exciting area of research with theoretical physicists, engineers and computer scientists working together to make progress...building super-fast computers, working out ways to do instantateous communication and more.

The basics of quantum computing

Quantum computers store data as qubits rather than bits but what are they and why are they special? … (read on)

This quantum message will self-destruct in 10 seconds

A fuse burning

Mission Impossible involved the team taking on impossible missions, delivered by a message concluding with the famous line “This message will self-destruct in 10 seconds”. Now, it is possible to actually do the apparently impossible: to send holographic messages that the sender can just make disappear even after they have been sent… (read on)

The Alien Cookbook

Horrified alien looking at two different bowls of soup

How to spot a bad chef when you’ve never tasted the food (OR How to spot a bad quantum simulator when you do not know what the quantum circuit it is simulating is supposed to do.)… (read on)

More to come (of course)

This blog is funded by EPSRC on grant EP/W033615/1.