At Last, We Are Discovering What Quantum Computers Will be Useful for

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Over the past decade, quantum computing has grown into a billion-dollar industry. Everyone seems to be investing in it, from tech giants, such as IBM and Google, to the US military.

But Ignacio Cirac at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, a pioneer of the technology, has a more sober assessment. A quantum computer is something that at the moment does not exist," he says. That is because building one that actually works - and is practical to use - is incredibly difficult.

Rather than the bits" of conventional machines, these computers use quantum bits, or qubits, to encode information. These can be made in several ways, from tiny superconducting circuits to extremely cold atoms, but all of them are complex to build.

The upside is that their quantum properties can be used to do certain kinds of computation more quickly than standard computers.

Such speed-ups are attractive for a range of problems that normal computers struggle with, from simulating exotic physics systems to efficiently scheduling passenger flights or grocery deliveries to supermarkets. Five years ago, it seemed quantum computers would ameliorate these and many other computational challenges.

Today, the situation is a lot more nuanced. Progress in building ever bigger quantum computers has, admittedly, been stunning, with several companies developing machines with more than 1000 qubits. But this has also revealed impossible-to-ignore difficulties.

[...] So, which problems might still benefit from quantum computation? Quantum computers could break the cryptography systems we currently use for secure communication, and this makes the technology interesting to governments and other institutions whose security could be imperiled by it, says Scott Aaronson at the University of Texas at Austin.

Another place where quantum computers should still be useful is in modelling materials and chemical reactions. This is because quantum computers, themselves a system of quantum objects, are perfectly suited to simulate other quantum systems, such as electrons, atoms and molecules.

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