.Overview.

This is a picture of the current version of transistors and TTL gates (Transistor Transistor Logic Gates) These are implemented on circuit boards and made into processors.

From the very beginning of the technological age, people have wanted to do things faster.  From cars and breaking the sound barrier, to vacuum tubes to transistors in computers, they have always tried to improve mechanical parts to make things faster.  Now, we have reached a new era, and are transitioning from transistors to qubits.  When computers were invented they used vacuum tubes as switches, and this was a problem because the vacuum tubes were slow and frequently broke.  This gave way to silicon based transistors, which led the way to microchips.  Now we are trying to improve even more, and make computers even faster using qubits.  Qubits are the fundamental transistor of quantum computing, the basis as to why it works.  The qubits are based upon quantum physics, which helps us view physics at an atomic level, seeing the interaction between electrons and neutrons in an atom.

Using quantum physics theory, we can use Schrodinger’s Equation, the wave/particle duality function to help predict these states and manipulate them.  Although it is much more difficult to explain the actual physics behind the states, which includes quantum entanglement, space/time parallelism, superposition, and quantum tunneling; the theory is that they will be able to solve problems much quicker than a normal classical computer.  David Deutsch is credited with becoming the first one to come up with the idea for a quantum computer using quantum mechanics. “The idea, Deutsch explains, emerged because of a debate he was having with a colleague, Charles Bennett, a scientist at I.B.M., about a sub-topic in computer science called computational-complexity theory (Rothman 2013).”  Computational-complexity theory is based upon solving problems that would take years to solve.

Quantum computing is not just a theory, there are many physicists working on experiments.  “Currently, there are a few companies working on quantum computers, the company D-Wave based out of Canada released the first quantum processor (Diep 2013)”, but there were questions as to if it worked because they could not test it because of the sensitivity of the quantum states.  They soon after developed a new test that verified that it did work.  “A few companies purchased this patent, including NASA, Google, and Lockheed & Martin (Diep 2013).”  Also, across the globe in Australia, they have invented a quantum crystal, that would take a computer the size of the universe to match its power (Duffy 2012).  “However, quantum computers not predicted for personal use for at least a decade in the future, but they are the answer to many unsolved problems (Merian 2012).”