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QUANTUM COMPUTING

Building the building blocks

Nature Physics volume 14, pages 974–975 (2018)Cite this article

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Large-scale quantum computations are hampered by the propagation of errors. Experiments have now demonstrated the deterministic teleportation of a quantum gate, which prevents error propagation by using a combination of quantum and classical bits.

Switches are the fundamental constitutive element of a computer. Quantum gates, their quantum analogues, form quantum computers. However, many switches alone do not a computer make: for large-scale computers to operate reliably despite having unreliable components, their meaningful basic building blocks need to be modular units with well-defined interfaces and reliable behaviour. Examples are the memory and central processing units (CPUs). How to achieve something similar for quantum computers has been understood in principle for over twenty years. Writing in Nature, Kevin Chou and co-workers1 have now realized experimentally the deterministic teleportation of a quantum gate between two logical quantum bits, demonstrating that the necessary reliable quantum building blocks for large-scale quantum computing systems are emerging also in practice.

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Fig. 1: Quantum computing architecture concepts.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Isaac Chuang

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  1. Isaac Chuang
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Correspondence to Isaac Chuang.

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Competing interests

Isaac Chuang serves on the scientific advisory board of Quantum Circuits, Inc.

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Chuang, I. Building the building blocks. Nature Phys 14, 974–975 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0296-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0296-4

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