Physics World November 29, 2019
Physics World journalists look back at the past decade of winners and explore how research in that field has moved on. Here they examine the 2009 breakthrough for the first “quantum computer”. In August 2009, a NIST team unveiled the first small-scale device that could be described as a quantum computer building up to the breakthrough where the team had used ultracold ions to demonstrate separately all of the steps needed for quantum computation; initializing the qubits; storing them in ions; performing a logic operation on one or two qubits; transferring the information between different locations in the processor; and reading out the qubit results individually. But in 2009, the group made the crucial breakthrough of combining all these stages onto a single device…read more.
Researchers at the at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, managed to create the first small-scale device that could be described as a quantum computer.