News First commercial quantum computer demoed

i thought they believed that space was actually filled with some particles that we don't know about ... (maybe just in theory)

brumster - i don't think it has been independently examined, I'm a little cautious about it because i find it hard to believe that they managed to achieve almost absolute 0 temperatures
This article was on slashdot and there were comments that it wasn't a true quantum computer, but has features that quantum computer have - also it seems quantum computers are actually not very good at (current) normal computing tasks

 

HMMM meaning of life here we come...

 

42

Anyway, commercial? At that temperature, how close can you get before you start feeling a tad frostbitten?

We have a long wait yet methinks....

 

Hum, does look interesting, as does some of the posts in this thread.

Sam

 

To the best of my knowledge the lowest T yet achieved in the lab is something like 80 picokelvin. Although this may have been lowered recently. This is what all the clever physicists do when they want to discover stuff like Bose - Einstein states, or get their funding renewed. Nanokelvin temperatures are now considered routine (1 x 10^-9 Kelvin) in the lab and are reached by both traping and expanding some atoms in uhv, but as Im a chemist and not a physicist Ill let you google 'how do I make nanokelvin stuff' for yourselves.

The 5 milikelvin that they quote in the paper is actually quite a high temperature as far as experimantal physics is concerned, there are quite a few telescopes of various design that work in this temperature range, as well as a few SQUIDs and other spectroscopic instruments.

 

nah it's 12

 

Thank you for proving to me that new posters aren't all babbling idiots full of "OMG YES "

 

This reminds me of something my Chemistry teacher was telling me last year, how electron pairs are attempting to be being used for data transfer - whatever happens to one will happen to another, which would mean almost instant data transfer across the world.

Quite revolutionary, but I doubt I'll see either of these technologies in my house any time soon. :'(

 

I've read about this in a couple of other publications which, apart from Scientific American, are all native to my Country. It is more like a "hybrid" computer, and not a "true" quantum computer. There are, however, true quantum computers in existence today, though I seem to remember they haven't gotten past the 10+10 stage yet. But the technology is sound, and the prospect is incredible.

There are also other, somewhat more exotic commmputer technologies under development. Among which are DNA-computers which also seem very promising in particular for medical research.