[3317] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Fighting Corruption in the Quantum World
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Pomes)
Fri Sep 18 16:05:34 1998
From: Paul Pomes <ppomes@Qualcomm.com>
To: cryptography@c2.net
Date: Fri, 18 Sep 1998 11:15:14 -0700
Andrew Watson, "Fighting Corruption in the Quantum World",
Volume 281, Number 5384 Issue of 18 Sep 1998, p 1781
<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/5384/1781a>
Summary:
Proposed quantum computers, operating according to the unfamiliar laws of
quantum mechanics, could in principle do certain types of problems such as
factoring big numbers incredibly efficiently and would render obsolete
today's most secure encryption systems, which are based on the difficulty
of this task. But skeptics say that the fragility of quantum information
threatens the whole idea of a practical quantum computer. Now a team of
theorists and experimenters has shown that quantum computers could identify
errors and fix them. Using the magnetization of atoms in organic molecules
to model a system of three quantum bits ("qubits"), they were able to
calculate the error on one qubit without disturbing it by looking at the
other two; they were then able to correct the error with a radio-frequency
pulse.
