Testing the limits of quantum mechanical superpositions

The performance of superconducting qubits has improved by several orders of magnitude in the past decade. These circuits benefit from the robustness of superconductivity and the Josephson effect, and at present they have not encountered any hard physical limits. However, building an error-corrected information processor with many such qubits will require solving specific architecture problems that constitute a new field of research. For the first time, physicists will have to master quantum error correction to design and operate complex active systems that are dissipative in nature, yet remain coherent indefinitely. We offer a view on some directions for the field and speculate on its future.

In information processing, as in physics, our classical world view provides an incomplete approximation to an underlying quantum reality. Quantum effects like interference and entanglement play no direct role in conventional information processing, but they can--in principle now, but probably eventually in practice--be harnessed to break codes, create unbreakable codes, and speed up otherwise intractable computations.