Splash Biography

You may have heard that computers are programmed with 0s and 1s. Although classically this is true, recent developments in physics and engineering have given rise to an entirely new type of computer that can be programmed using quantum bits or "qubits". These computers, called quantum computers, exhibit some strange yet powerful phenomena, such as quantum superposition, and thus have recently been getting a lot of attention for their theoretical ability to solve some very difficult computational problems that classical computers would have a very hard time solving. This all sounds super cool, but there's a big problem: quantum computers, or specifically qubits, are really really hard to make. Still to this day, scientists and engineers cannot seem to agree on what is the best way to build a qubit, with large companies and governments pouring millions of dollars into quantum hardware research every year. In this class, we will go over some of ways people have tried to physically implement qubits, explain how they work, and discuss the various ways we can quantify how "good" a qubit is.