Keep your feet on the ground

摘要

Information processing based on quantum-mechanical interactions has the potential to yield a new and powerful set of computational tools and capabilities. In essence, replacing the classical bits of information in today's electronic devices with quantum bits (qubits) enables a computation to proceed on the basis of the rules of quantum mechanics. As one might surmise, however, if the quantum nature of this computational evolution were somehow corrupted along the way, the entire computation would be brought into question. On page 194 of this issue, Johnson et al. demonstrate that the evolution of a superconducting system of eight qubits is indeed consistent with the principles of quantum mechanics when a particular protocol called quantum annealing is implemented.