I was watching and listening to Christopher Monroe's presentation he gave over the Zoom, a few weeks ago. Christopher Monroe showing the world how to build a quantum computer, which will benefit YOU, me, and every one we know, and everything that lives on earth. It has the potential to change and improve the world we live in. So, If you are interested in Quantum computing, this presentation is a an excellent sample from many online presentations about QC.
Before you listen to him, perhaps it it helpful to look over my summary.
His specialty is Ion trapping and Atomic Physics. In this short video, he covers construction of an ion trap device, trapping natural qubits, made of "Atomic Clock Quality Atoms," which is then shuttling them into the a linear trap area, trapped in vacuum, but room-temperature. The atoms then manipulated (entangled) for computation tasks.
Chris, is also a co-founder of IonQ, an ion trapping quantum computing company. Chris explains how to trap, put in superposition, maintain coherence. He touches on doing gates (for computation) using different methods and how to control errors and different types of qubits. He explains ways to measure the ion states via lasers, how to push them around, lasso them and make them behave in a long coherent entangled state. He explains how to shuttle them via software in, control and track their motions, charge them via different lasers frequency and amplitude. It is a crazy mixture of Atomic Physics, Quantum Physics, classical physics, classical computing, philosophy!, exotic material and optical lasers. Don't expect to decipher any proprietary information, this is only a snapshot of ion trapping model, explained by a scientist.
In the second part of his presentation, Chris explains the physical inner workings of the trapped area on the chip, and explains why using lasers vs. microwave to poke at the atoms.
Things get interesting when he starts talking about scaling these traps to trap more ions, make a large groups of them to behave, in near future, and touches on the pristine nature of his ion qubits vs superconducting qubits. His next path paved to do effective error correction and long coherence time for 1,000,000 qubits on chip. He explains what must happen for error correction algorithms and their role in achieving 1,000,000 qubits, running in parallel at high fidelity.
Their current system at IonQ, equipped with 32 high-fidelity qubits of Ytterbium-171, isolated inside a tiny airless (total vacuum) trap made of basically solid state silicon with many carefully planed electrodes to poke the ions. That means his computation capacity is at the 2 to the power 32. You can run interesting problems and get feed back. The ion trap chip hardware fabricated at Sandia nation lab working with IonQ and a few university physics lab. The technology is democratized; there is a complete set of software API available to run a mixture of simple and complex algorithms via the CLOUD. To submit to the QC hardware, you can use a laptop to present your problem over the CLOUD.
When we get to a scaled up system, we have a powerful tool at our disposal. The ability to, at will, impromptu, without much restraint to control atoms, electrons, protons (nature) and make them behave the way we want to is a powerful thing. We can do amazing things that would benefits us all.
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