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The famous
F
expensive—that’s power that we only imagine now from experiment done by Heinrich Hertz,
what we want our watching Star Trek. was just one of the many successful
computers to be. experiments. It gave evidence for the
No matter how What is quantum mechanics? propagation of electromagnetic waves
good a computer The purpose of physics, or more gen- using a simple transmitter-detector sys-
chip is…it’s never good enough. erally the purpose of science, is to gen- tem. (Hertz actually didn’t use light-
We all know, at least to some extent, erate a model of the real world around waves, but his experiment gave a strong
how today’s computer works. The digi- us. Physical theories are, therefore, proof of the validity of Maxwell’s theo-
tal logic behind it is actually very sim- models with which we try to understand ry in general.)
ple and fairly intuitive: an array of 0s or explain why and how various phe- Later on, new experiments were
and 1s represents a number. One that is nomena around us happen. A good the- done which again forced scientists to
easy to store, manipulate and to handle ory is also capable of making correct believe in the particle nature of light.
with our present level of technology. predictions, i. e. describing never-done Einstein, for example, explained the
Today, this digital logic is imple- experiments and telling you how their photoelectric effect in terms of the par-
mented using transistors: devices that results will turn out. We then can per- ticle nature of light, and obtained a
are widely believed to have been the form tests in the laboratory to see noble prize for it. So is light made up of
greatest invention of the 20th century. whether or not these predictions hold. particles or is it a wave?
Much time and money is being invest- The answer is very beautifully
ed in developing new, smaller ones. contained in the words of Richard
(Just visit intel.com’s news section.) Feynman—one of the greatest
However, what is being done is Quantum physicists of the 20th century— "it
merely a change of technology or a is like neither."
change of techniques: adjustments in Light doesn’t behave exactly like
the manufacturing or design procedure
of semiconductors that may result in
computers a wave; it also doesn’t behave
exactly like a particle—at least, not
better transistors, hence, better chips. always. So it must be something
(The other way is to develop better else, something in between, or some
techniques for using these transistors, kind of combination of the
to lay them out in such a way that bet- two…that's what we may think. But
ter circuits are built.) let's look at the answer.
An alternative to this approach to The more complete description
advancing technology would be to of light—and of any other "thing" in
think about the basic philosophy behind Pedram Khalili this world, including matter—states:
our computers: the digital logic they are It is made up of particles, but these
founded on. Amiri particles are distributed wave-like,
A simple run through suggests an hence we see both effects. To
interesting solution: as we want our redefining logic
be a little more technical, the
computers to get smaller, we eventually probability of finding these
would want the smallest unit of these particles in a certain point (of
computers, the bit, to be the smallest space and time) has a wave-
possible unit of matter: the atom. Quantum mechanics is just one of like distribution.
However, using atoms as digital bits these physical theories. It was devel- But that rough description is obvi-
will start a completely new era in com- oped to explain some of the experi- ously not enough. We need a quantita-
puter design. Atoms cannot be simply ments’ results in the first half of the tive way, an equation, to solve for the
manipulated and used like the bits built 20th century. We don’t need to concern probability of finding a particle in a
with transistors. The behavior of matter ourselves about the complete theory; special point (of space and time). This
on the atomic scale follows the rules of we can just touch on the main points in is implemented by the Schrödinger
modern physics. This behavior cannot order to develop our discussion about Equation, named after Erwin
be understood in terms of our classical quantum computers. Schrödinger, who first formulated it.
description of the world (i. e. Newtonian One good way to quickly grasp the This differential equation is basically
Mechanics or Maxwell’s Equations in basics of quantum mechanics is to con- the principle of conservation of energy,
Electromagnetics). sider the well-known problem of light's translated to the new probability-wave
The physical theory dealing with duality. Light was initially believed to formalism of quantum mechanics.
such behavior is called quantum be a build up of particles. Newton, for Using this equation, we can find the
mechanics. Its use in the computer example, was one of the most impor- probability function for any particle in
industry will most probably cause a tant scientists who tried to explain any given set of environmental and ini-
revolution in the way we use and light’s behavior this way. tial conditions.
understand computers. We are going to Then, a Scottish physicist, James C. We don’t need to deal with the
describe how such a quantum Maxwell, showed theoretically that whole mathematics of the problem, as it
computer—a computer based on the light is a combination of alternating is not essential to our brief discussion
rules of quantum mechanics—may electrical and magnetic fields, hence a of quantum computing. We will only
work, and how it is going to give us wave. Experiments were done and the use some of its results.
Inset: When a magnetic cobalt atom is placed at a focus point of an elliptical corral
(upper left), some of its properties also appear at the other focus (lower left), where no
atoms exist. When the cobalt atom is not placed at a focus point (upper right), the
mirage disappears (lower right). In the big picture, a change in the surface electrons
due to the cobalt’s magnetism—the Kondo resonance—appears as a bright spot at
each focus. This phenomenon, called the “quantum mirage” effect, uses the wave
nature of electrons rather than a wire. (PHOTO CREDITS: IBM)
8 IEEE POTENTIALS
base. In a database with N entries, a clas- place the state of") qubits has been Quantum Computation and Quantum
sical search algorithm would normally found that is called teleportation. This Information, Cambridge University
need N/2 tries for finding the desired has also been carried out experimentally Press, 2000.
item, where as Grover’s algorithm needs on very simple systems. • C. Paquin, "Computing in the
only a number on the order of the square- Teleportation is being considered as Quantum World," [online], Available:
root of N, which is much faster. a way of transmitting the contents of http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~paquin/Q
It would not be appropriate to quantum registers over a distance. This u/quantumComp.pdf
develop the concept of quantum algo- is an essential issue to resolve if any • J. Mullins, "The Topsy Turvy