Teaching Qubits New Tricks

by Charles Seife Science, 8 Jul 2005 Quantum computers will shatter the encryption that makes Internet commerce safe, search databases at unthinkable speeds, and crank out ciphers that nature itself guarantees secure -- if they can be built. For years, scientists thought that would never happen because the same laws of physics that make quantum computers so powerful seemed to make a practical prototype impossible. But in 1995, when they discovered a means of preserving fragile quantum information despite those laws, quantum computing took a step closer to reality. The heart of the discovery was a way to correct errors in quantum information without destroying the information itself. These so-called quantum error correcting codes lie at the heart of quantum-computer research. Read more