A university student in Australia has developed the world's largest cluster of quantum systems ever - a milestone that brings super-powerful, super-fast quantum computers a step closer to reality.
Working with a team in Tokyo, the Australian National University (ANU) PhD student Seiji Armstrong has made a quantum leap towards next-generation computing.
"The more quantum systems you have in the cluster, the more powerful your quantum computer will be, Armstrong said.
"Previously the world record was 14. But in our experiment we went to more than 10,000 at once," said Armstrong.
Each quantum system can encode a quantum 'bit' of information, like the binary system that a traditional computer uses, said Armstrong.
"In today's computers you have 'bits' of information - a bit is a 0 or a 1. A quantum bit is similar but it can also exist in another state - instead of just a 0 or a 1 it can be in what's called a 'superposition'," said Armstrong.
Armstrong says the potential applications of this research are endless.
"Eventually, we'll be able to use these quantum clusters to build quantum communication networks with very fast but also very secure and very powerful transmission lines," he said.
"In a normal computer, if you had 1,000 bits you might be able to solve a bunch of very easy problems. In a quantum computer with 1,000 quantum bits you'd be able to solve way more difficult problems - problems that classical computers can't solve," said Armstrong.
Other applications might be so far advanced we can't even imagine them in today's world, he said.
