Quantum Computing Power

Quantum Computing Power: One Step Closer

What is the future of super high power, decision-making computers? It’s quantum computing, of course. But developers have been perplexed for years now about how to get some of the details to work. For example, one problem has been accurately processing the sheer amount of data involved with quantum computing power. Another issue involves storing the quantum information for a period of over half a minute. Two teams of researchers from Australia and Wales have overcome these two issues and the world is one step closer to quantum computing.

Data in a regular computer is referred to as a bit (either a 1 or a 0). While quantum units of data have the same 1 or 0 designation, they are given the name qubits. Again, one major issue with quantum computing has been the fragility of qubits. Data that dissolves in under 30 seconds leads to miscalculations which may start small but end up making the quantum algorithms ultimately unusable. That’s why overcoming the fragile state of the qubits and increasing the accuracy of calculations have been a main focus of researchers.

The two teams used silicon to develop qubits that mastered the limitations of previous qubits, which were developed from phosphorus. A silicon-28 isotope suffers no effect from magnetic fields, allowing it to be used in an electronic device (like other items made from silicon). A major advantage with the silicon-28 isotope is it dropped the margin of error to a remarkable 0.01 percent. This means that only 1 out of every 10,000 operations failed to produce an accurate result.

Moreover, the data remained intact for over half a minute. In the world of quantum computing, that may as well be forever, since things happen in microseconds. Now the teams are working on increasing quantum computing power even further by developing super precise qubits in tangled pairs.