Quantum technologies promise to improve the way we do various things – from trading over the internet to performing powerful simulations for chemistry, and even engineering nanotechnology. There’s a quantum revolution going on, but it’s still a work in progress. While we can expect to develop simple quantum machines that perform specific tasks in a relatively short time, the real holy grail for us quantum physicists is quantum supremacy – the scenario in which, for a specific computational task, quantum machines unambiguously surpass any conventional (classical) hardware. If we can achieve quantum supremacy, the world will at last be able to fully profit from the power of quantum mechanics, something that has not been possible up until now.
This post is part of a blog series with Young Scientists ahead of the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2015, which took place in Dalian, China, from 9-11 September. In this blog, Fabio Sciarrino, Associate Professor at Sapienza University, talks about where quantum technologies may take us.