Just a few years ago, many researchers in quantum computing thought it would take several decades to develop machines that could solve complex tasks, such as predicting how chemicals react or cracking encrypted text. But now, there is growing hope that such machines could arrive in the next ten years.
A ‘vibe shift’ is how Nathalie de Leon, an experimental quantum physicist at Princeton University in New Jersey, describes the change. “People are now starting to come around.”
The pace of progress in the field has picked up dramatically, especially in the past two years or so, along several fronts. Teams in academic laboratories, as well as companies ranging from small start-ups to large technology corporations, have drastically reduced the size of errors that notoriously fickle quantum devices tend to produce, by improving both the manufacturing of quantum devices and the techniques used to control them. Meanwhile, theorists better understand how to use quantum devices more efficiently.
“At this point, I am much more certain that quantum computation will be realized, and that the timeline is much shorter than people thought,” says Dorit Aharonov, a computer scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “We’ve entered a new era.”
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