Quantum technology & computing

Technological progress goes hand in hand with incessant advances in computing power. Modern personal electronic devices have the computational power of a supercomputer from just a decade ago. Computer-aided designs, logistics, data analysis and cognitive computing have become an essential part of modern life. However, current progress in down-scaling transistors reaches physical limits when approaching atomic scales, and heat dissipation becomes a severe issue with increasing transistor densities.

Above all, certain complex physical problems such as computing energy spectra, correlations or time dynamics in molecular and condensed matter systems are beyond the reach of classical computers. These computations require exponential resources. The reason for this is the exponential growth of Hilbert space with the number of particles, preventing the computation of systems with more than a modest number of 50 particles. With a few more particles, even future supercomputers are destined to fail.

In contrast, a quantum computer has the potential to compute ground-state energies, energy spectra, time dynamics and correlations of such systems efficiently. Moreover, it is expected that certain types of optimization problems with application in logistics, time-scheduling and others can be solved more efficiently with the help of quantum effects.