Team closes in on “holy grail” of room temperature quantum computing chips

Don't they keep it close to absolute zero though? There's a large range between absolute zero and room temperature.

That’s not even half that equipment needed to reach cryogenic temperatures. What you linked appears to be the experimental setup that will get placed in some sort of cold chamber.

On an unrelated note: room temperature quantum chips would likely be more energy efficient as the coolers that go that cold aren’t particularly efficient.

Source: I used to work for a cryogenics companies.

Most of what you see in that picture is commercially-available, commodity scientific-grade cryogenics gear. There are a handful of suppliers that make this kind of gear and it's probably pretty common across all of the superconducting QC research machines.

So yeah, it's crazy machinery, but it's not anything special to IBM. Hopefully there's pressure to miniaturize it, but ultimately do you want to have to worry about getting a Helium 3 delivery to be able to use your laptop?

Yeah, MS announced awhile ago. [0].

I've had it in my todo's for almost two years now...still haven't played with it yet.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/quantum/language/?view=qsha...

The joke is that Microsoft has a beautiful software stack and no hardware.

Well, since I don't really have access to a real quantum computer yet, I'm ok with it just being on a simulator; I'm assuming that if/when quantum computers become cheap enough for consumer products, the MS team will probably work to make Q# support it.

That stylization is very exhausting (yes, I know what a "ket" is)

So shor's algorithm for factoring primes get's a lot of press in the software community because it unravels chunks of encryption, but grover's algorithm for inverting functions is also pretty neat and it would have lots of constructive applications in engineering contexts where you're trying to find configurations that satisfy non-linear constraints.

They're trying to make a computer that computes using light that bounces around inside the computer. The more the light bounces around, the dimmer it gets, and the less effective it becomes at computing things. They figured out a way to make the light bounce around twice as long (and so be able to compute more stuff) before it gets too dim to work any more.

("Dim" isn't quite the right word, but you did say five.)