Facilitating technological innovations through quantum computing

Can Ray Laflamme and the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) prevent Moore's Law from collapsing upon itself?

And will that same effort prevent the world's tech-based economy from sinking into stagnation?

These are the issues being wrestled with as Canadian researchers reconfigure the nature of computer science - in part, to ensure that a hypothesis first put forward by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965 continues to operate. Moore's Law argues that the number of chips that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit will double every two years.

A consequence of this multiplication of chips is that almost everything associated with computerization - processing speed, memory capacity and picture resolution - has also been increasing exponentially. This growth has translated into a 21st-century world in which everything that is computerized can do more and more things in a smaller and smaller space. That means people buy new products - think cell phones, think televisions - every year or two because these products are both patently better and generally cheaper. And this, of course, spurs economic growth.

But the generally accepted analysis of the future proposed by Moore's Law says that in a decade or so, the law will bump up against a physical reality; namely that you simply can't make chips any smaller.

The result, says Laflamme, who is the director of IQC, would be a world in which technological change would dramatically slow down, if not halt entirely. "Imagine that people stop building new software and new computers. And all those new applications that people are used to seeing, no longer happen. The telephones that we assume are going to change for the better every year will stop appearing," he argues. "And then people will say, 'Why the hell am I buying a new telephone when it just does the same things as old one did?'"

Enter quantum computing. In the quantum world, elemental particles - the photon, which is the basis of light, for example - defy the classic laws of Newtonian physics. For one thing, they can be in both one place and another or in a combination of those two places at the same time.

If one could use the different quantum states to store computerized data information, the possibilities for endless exponential improvement would once again become the law of the day. This is because instead of the on/off of today's chips (the 0 and 1 "bits" that are the alphabet of computer code) one could create a mathematic formula based on the numerous different states of existence of quantum particles - states that are called "qubits."

The rub, says Laflamme, is that "in a traditional parallel computer every time you add a bit, you have just added a bit. When you add a a qubit, you double the capacity." Thus, while the 12-atom qubits that Laflamme and his group have built to date wouldn't even translate into the capacities of a sophisticated calculator, if researchers can control 40 atoms - that is, 40 qubits - we would be talking about the quantum equivalent of a supercomputer doing trillions of operations simultaneously.

But getting to the nirvana of useful quantum computing is not simple. The present technology requires quite exact magnetic control over qubits using superconducting material that has been cooled to a few degrees higher than absolute zero -273 ° C. So Laflamme thinks that, in the short term, increased control over atoms in the quantum world could create seminal changes in other areas, most notably quantum-based encryption of computer messages.

That's bold, a boldness backed up by the fact that, aided by a private donation of $46.8 million by RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis to IQC, Canada now has the highest number of quantum cryptography university researchers in the world - all of which has given researchers a sense of not just purpose but, one might say, of quantum destiny.

"There are lots of things we haven't done yet, but I really think quantum computing is inevitable," says Laflamme.