D-Wave

Although experts are thinking that it will take 15 years to build a proper quantum computer. Everybody seems to get a bit nervous when a company like D-wave claims to already have a quantum computer.

This week Matthias Troyer, who already wrote about the first D-Wave, visited the QuTech-group in Delft. He had access to the D-Wave 2, which was sold to Google and Lockheed, and showed, during a very entertaining talk, that the claims of D-Wave are wildly exaggerated.

Troyer showed some admiration for the electronics in D-wave 2. Curiously D-wave is not very secretive about the qubits. The company doesn't want to tell anything about the electronics linking the qubits, which seems to be impressive, and could possibly be of good use in other approaches of building a quantum computer.

Troyer will publish his findings on the ArXiv in december. 

See also:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.4595

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog

I like Andrea Morello's explanation of the quantum computer. It helped me understand why entanglement is so important in quantum computing. This is why most people working on quantum computing don't consider the D-Wave computer to be a real quantum computer. They don't believe that the qubits in the D-Wave are really entangled. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_IaVepNDT4

Ettore Majorana

The first time I heard of Majorana-particles was in a great online lecture of Leonard Susskind. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzGY-BrCUgA
At around 1:14:00 Susskind discusses Majorana particles and tells us that Ettore Majorana disappeared after discovering the particle in 1938. I did want to know more and started reading about this man who'd disappeared mysteriously. Was it suicide? Was he killed by the Nazi's or did he flee to Argentina? I wanted to write about this, but there was no topical reason to do so, until I read about Dutch physicist Leo Kouwenhoven, who had 'discovered' the Majorana particle. It seemed to be a good alibi to write about the life of Ettore Majorana and I made an appointment with Kouwenhoven. But what he told me was so interesting, that I still haven't written about Ettore Majorana.

quantum computing

Understanding how a quantum computer could be build and programmed is quite difficult, not only for me, but also for the people who devote decades of their lives to the subject. If I find out or discover something which is helpful in understanding a part of the intriguing race to build the first real quantum computer, I'll document it here.