News Feed | 15 Jan 2024

The Hindu | 15 Jan 2024

Summary

• Information technology (IT) is indispensable in many aspects of life which includes

communication, banking, business, health, education, and entertainment. It banks on
devices that store and process vast amounts of information at unimaginable speeds.
• Modern computers use semiconductor transistors to create circuits that act as bits. A single
semiconductor chip can house over 100 million transistors in just 1 sq. mm. As these
transistors shrink, they become increasingly prone to quantum effects.
• According to Moore's law (1965), computing power increases tenfold every five years.
However, we have now slowed to a two-fold increase every five years. Despite this slow
down, the quantum computing revolution is nearing.
• Quantum bits or Qubits are the basic unit of quantum computers. Just like a regular
computer, a qubit has two states. It could be the spin of a particle in two different
directions or a superconducting circuit mimicking an atom. The quantum gate, which is
often an electromagnetic pulse, alters the state of a qubit or group of qubits.
• A key restriction of conventional computer architecture is that each bit can only exist in
one of the two states, 0 or 1. However, a qubit can exist in a superposition of both states
simultaneously, according to quantum physics.
• For example, to perform a calculation that needs 16 different inputs, a standard computer
needs four bits and 16 computations. However, a quantum computer could generate
answers for all 16 inputs in one computation with four qubits in superposition.
• Quantum gates operate on qubits in quantum computers to process information. The
action of any quantum gate on a superposition is the superposition of the effects of the
quantum gate on the basis states that contribute to the initial superposition, a key feature
common to all quantum gates.
• Different gates, like the Hadamard gate and the controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate, combined
with a few others (that work on single qubits) can perform all possible logical operations on
binary data encoded on qubits. These can be combined to form quantum circuits capable
of information processing.
• Research related to reliable quantum computers and suitable quantum algorithms is being
actively pursued globally. Industries from drug design to safe communications could benefit
from large-scale, reliable quantum computers.

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