Understanding Quantum Computing, How Quantum Physics will bring new dawn of technology
The fundamental building block of computing have always been the same. It is based on zeros or ones ( 0 or 1 ) and with transistors being the every heart of it. All modern digital electronics, communication, processing to storage, every digital device is following the same fundamental rules of computing. Technology around computing have surely evolved. Devices have become smaller, efficient, faster than ever before, but continuing on the same principles.
On hardware front, with advancement in manufacturing process, we are now able to pack billions of transistor on a chip thereby increasing the compute power.
Similarly, through efficient algorithms, we can achieve better and faster processing.
However, the progress thus far have been in quite predictable and in line with our technological advancements. In order to achieve a significant breakthrough in computing, researchers are now focusing towards the realm of Quantum mechanics.
What is Quantum mechanics ?
In Physics, Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory, that explains physical behaviour of matter or light at scale of atom and subatomic scale.
Quantum mechanics allows new ways to design systems that can utilize the properties of quantum state of matter, in order to achieve advantage on classical computing.
In present day technology, when transistors are reaching new limits in terms of size being small as few nano-meter, quantum mechanics offers to provide more than just classical state of 0 and 1.
With quantum mechanics, a computing design provides complex states, form zeros and ones to superposition of these states, this allows more information that can processed and hence far more computational power than classical computing.
This capability gives Quantum Computing a edge, where it can solve computational problem that are not feasible for classical computing to solve in meaningful time, it also known as quantum advantage.
What is Quantum Computing ?
Quantum Computing utilizes quantum bit or qubit states of 0, 1 and superposition of 0 and 1 to process more data during computation to perform.
These states can be from different quantum mechanical designs such as Polarization of light, Number of photons, Atomic spin, Electron localisation, Electronic spin, Vibrational states.
Quantum Computing provides huge computational advantage over classical computing.
To put things in perspective, factoring a 500 digit number might take years with classical computing, but with quantum computing it can hours to days, of course depending upon design and problem used for computation.
Quantum Computing is now gaining traction as huge investments with new research and development taking underway. While a personal quantum computer may be years away, some use cases of quantum computing may make its way in peoples lives.
