{"id":233955,"date":"2026-03-24T03:28:23","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T08:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/quantum-computers-could-have-a-fundamental-limit-after-all"},"modified":"2026-03-24T03:28:23","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T08:28:23","slug":"quantum-computers-could-have-a-fundamental-limit-after-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/quantum-computers-could-have-a-fundamental-limit-after-all","title":{"rendered":"Quantum computers could have a fundamental limit after all"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/quantum-computers-could-have-a-fundamental-limit-after-all2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The performance of quantum computers could cap out after around 1,000 qubits, according to a new analysis published in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pnas.org\/doi\/abs\/10.1073\/pnas.2523350123\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i><\/a>. Through new calculations, Tim Palmer at the University of Oxford has reconsidered the mathematical foundations underlying the quantum principles behind the technology, concluding that restrictions on the information-carrying capacity of large quantum systems could make their computing power far more limited than many researchers predict.<\/p>\n<p>For some time, quantum physicists have been growing increasingly excited\u2014and concerned\u2014about the seemingly limitless potential of quantum computers. In a classical computer, information content generally grows linearly as the number of bits increases. But in a quantum computer, each extra qubit doubles the number of quantum states the system can occupy.<\/p>\n<p>Since these states can encode multiple possibilities at the same time, the overall system appears to become exponentially more powerful with each added qubit\u2014at least according to our current understanding of quantum mechanics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The performance of quantum computers could cap out after around 1,000 qubits, according to a new analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Through new calculations, Tim Palmer at the University of Oxford has reconsidered the mathematical foundations underlying the quantum principles behind the technology, concluding that restrictions on the information-carrying [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,2229,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-mathematics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233955\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}