{"id":28758,"date":"2016-08-08T18:34:33","date_gmt":"2016-08-09T01:34:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/toward-practical-quantum-computers-built-in-optics-could-enable-chips-that-use-trapped-ions-as-quantum-bits"},"modified":"2017-06-04T14:27:00","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T21:27:00","slug":"toward-practical-quantum-computers-built-in-optics-could-enable-chips-that-use-trapped-ions-as-quantum-bits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/toward-practical-quantum-computers-built-in-optics-could-enable-chips-that-use-trapped-ions-as-quantum-bits","title":{"rendered":"Toward practical quantum computers: Built-in optics could enable chips that use trapped ions as quantum bits"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/toward-practical-quantum-computers-built-in-optics-could-enable-chips-that-use-trapped-ions-as-quantum-bits.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Quantum computers are largely hypothetical devices that could perform some calculations much more rapidly than conventional computers can. Instead of the bits of classical computation, which can represent 0 or 1, quantum computers consist of quantum bits, or qubits, which can, in some sense, represent 0 and 1 simultaneously.<\/p>\n<p>Although quantum systems with as many as 12 <a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/qubits\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">qubits<\/a> have been demonstrated in the lab, building quantum computers complex enough to perform useful computations will require miniaturizing qubit technology, much the way the miniaturization of transistors enabled modern computers.<\/p>\n<p>Trapped ions are probably the most widely studied qubit technology, but they\u2019ve historically required a large and complex hardware apparatus. In today\u2019s <i>Nature Nanotechnology<\/i>, researchers from MIT and MIT Lincoln Laboratory report an important step toward practical quantum computers, with a paper describing a prototype chip that can trap ions in an electric field and, with built-in optics, direct <a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/laser+light\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">laser light<\/a> toward each of them.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/m.phys.org\/news\/2016-08-quantum-built-in-optics-enable-chips.html\">http:\/\/m.phys.org\/news\/2016&#45;08-quantum-built-in-optics-enable-chips.html<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Quantum computers are largely hypothetical devices that could perform some calculations much more rapidly than conventional computers can. Instead of the bits of classical computation, which can represent 0 or 1, quantum computers consist of quantum bits, or qubits, which can, in some sense, represent 0 and 1 simultaneously. Although quantum systems with as many [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28758","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\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28758"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66651,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28758\/revisions\/66651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}