IEEE Spectrum November 15, 2018
A useful quantum computer needs to process a set of continuous parameters that is larger than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe. According to researchers in France while experimental research is beneficial and may lead to a better understanding of complicated quantum systems, they are skeptical that these efforts will ever result in a practical quantum computer. Such a computer would have to be able to manipulate—on a microscopic level and with enormous precision—a physical system characterized by an unimaginably huge set of parameters, each of which can take on a continuous range of values. Could we ever learn to control the more than 10300 continuously variable parameters defining the quantum state of such a system? …read more.
Illustration: Christian Gralingen