Photon quantum computer

Chinese scientists have built the world's first photon quantum computer, the computing speed of which could surpass the current most powerful supercomputer by 2020.

It is the first quantum computing machine based on single photons that goes beyond the early classical computer, and it paves the way to a quantum computer that can beat classical computers.

Many scientists believe that in the future quantum computers will dwarf today's supercomputers in terms of processing power, and the manipulation of multi-particle entanglement, which is the core of quantum computing technology, has been the focus of international competition in quantum computing research.

The new photon quantum computer is 10 to 100 times faster than the world's first electronic and transistor computers, and 24,000 times faster than the speeds achieved in other photon quantum computing experiments.

It was designed by China’s leading quantum physicist Pan Jianwei, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues, Lu Chaoyang and Zhu Xiaobo, of the University of Science and Technology of China, and Wang Haohua of Zhejiang University.

Now, they are using the high-performance single photon source and electronically programmable photonic circuit to build a prototype multi-photon quantum computer.

Despite substantial progress in the past two decades, building quantum machines that can outperform classical computers in some specific tasks — a milestone termed “quantum supremacy” — remains challenging.