Quantum computing has long seemed like one of those technologies that are 20 years away, and always will be. But 2017 could be the year that the field sheds its research-only image.
Computing giants Google and Microsoft recently hired a host of leading lights, and have set challenging goals for this year. Their ambition reflects a broader transition taking place at start-ups and academic research labs alike: to move from pure science towards engineering.
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Google started working on a form of quantum computing that harnesses superconductivity in 2014. It hopes this year, or shortly after, to perform a computation that is beyond even the most powerful classical supercomputers an elusive milestone known as quantum supremacy. Its rival, Microsoft, is betting on an intriguing but unproven concept, topological quantum computing, and hopes to perform a first demonstration of the technology.
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Academic labs are at a similar point. We have demonstrated all the components and all the functions we need, says Schoelkopf, who continues to run a group racing to build a quantum computer at Yale. Although plenty of physics experiments still need to be done to get components to work together, the main challenges are now in engineering, he and other researchers say. The quantum computer with the most qubits so far 20 is being tested in an academic lab led by Rainer Blatt at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
