quantum
Quantum word itself is magical in nature and it’s phenomena are unnatural to believe.
Ravish Kumar
Sun Jun 04 2023 - 6 min read
Most of the time we come across a word, Quantum Computer. And our brain starts to build various imaginations, and it perceives it as something magical.
Quantum word itself is magical in nature and it’s phenomena are unnatural to believe. But it’s true and real phenomena, and scientists started to build computing devices based on quantum phenomena.
I am trying to share my experience and understanding about this computing technology, and hope it'll give you another perspective to understand and learn about it. I will keep it short and concise and will share some resources which might be helpful in your quantum journey
There are problems that today’s systems will never be able to solve. For challenges above a certain size and complexity, we don’t have enough computational power on Earth to tackle them.
There are various computationally intensive tasks, such as using quantum systems to train and run machine learning algorithms that could allow us to solve complex problems in less time. Using quantum in finance has a significant advantage over classical computing.
All computing systems rely on a fundamental ability to store and manipulate information. And millions of bits work together to process and display information.
You might be aware of the fact that classical computers work on classical bits, which is ‘0’ or ‘1’ at a time. It takes all the decisions by manipulating 1’s and 0’s. To know more about binary manipulation, and how it works, you can take help from Google.
Unlike classical computers, ‘Quantum Computer’ works on quantum ‘qubit’, which can either be ‘0’ or ‘1’, or ‘0’ and ‘1’ at a time.
It seems easy to understand, yes it can be both ‘0’ and ‘1’ at a time, but think of it’s application in the real world other than theory perspective.
For classical computers, we use two possible conditions, whether there is current in the circuit or not, if yes, then we use it as true or 1 else false or 0 and do all the computation manipulating 0’s and 1’s. And it’s funny to assume it has current as well, not current in the same circuit at same time.
So, it’s clear from above that, we cannot use classical phenomena to have quantum effects, we need something different.
Quantum computers leverage different physical phenomena, such as superposition, entanglement and interference to manipulate information. And to do this, it relies on different physical devices i.e. qubits or quantum bits.
Superconducting qubits are just metal on a silicon chip, arranged in such a way, if we cool down below some temperature, it behaves like superconducting material, resulting in flow of electrons without resistance.
In classical computing, a bit is the basic unit of information, In quantum computing, a qubit or quantum bit is the basic unit of quantum information.
Some physical objects that can be used to achieve qubits are simple photons, a nucleus or electrons.
If we take electrons of any element, in this case we are taking the outermost electron of the Phosphorus atom.
We are well aware of the fact that electrons have spins and can be assumed as ‘positive spin’ or ‘negative spin’, depending upon the alignment of electrons in the magnetic field or you can say it as higher energy state and lower energy state.
We can manipulate its state, simply by taking or giving energy to it.
And the fact which distinguishes it from bits is that it's always in quantum superposition and is never at a totally higher state or lower state and we can only deduce the information after measuring it’s quantum energy. It may be 60 percent positive and 40 percent negative i.e. mixed of two states and the result always depends on relative probabilities.
As we are well aware as of now, if we have two qubits, it can represent information equivalent to four possible combinations of bits.
In general, if we have ‘N’ qubits, then it can handle 2^N combinations of bits. To determine the states we need four numbers (say n1, n2, n3, n4) and output must be a linear combination of these four numbers.
We can see from the equation that the computation power increases exponentially as we increase qubits. That means, the amount of steps to reach a certain calculation will decrease exponentially, leading to huge applications of Quantum computing.
It needs such logical physical devices, which can measure the final computational state, as it is nearly impossible to measure each superposition state. And the final result will give a unique combination.
https://www.ibm.com/quantum-computing/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/solutions/quantum-computing/
I hope you loved this article. You are always welcome to suggest improvements and discuss your own perspective and research work in comment section.
