How Caltech physicists are helping to bring us ever closer to our quantum future

摘要

The quantum world is bizarre. It's a world where particles are waves and waves are particles, where an electron doesn't have to choose between door number one or door number two but can zip through both at the same time. Still, that weirdness serves a purpose; it has a use. In the last few decades, physicists have come to realize that such scientific eccentricities can be harnessed to create a whole new breed of computers-computers that need only seconds to solve problems that would take thousands of years to crack if fed into a conventional computer.