Quantum technology will change our daily life in various aspects. Here you can learn more about the underlying principles and get an insight into quantum physics.
A clock is simply an apparatus that counts a repetitive event, e.g. in a mechanical clock, a pendulum might swing once every second and by counting the number of swings, one knows how many seconds have passed. Atomic clocks use atoms, more precisely the electronic transition from one state to another as their ‘pendulum’.
So how does one program a quantum computer? It is not so different from what a classical computer is doing under the hood: Data are stored in registered and these are connected by a temporal sequence of machine-level commands. These commands are very primitive functions of binary logic.
Diamonds are known to be beautiful and ever-lasting jewels. Pure diamonds are transparent for visible light, but they can get a color due to the inclusion of defects called color centers. One of them, the NV color center gives a pink color to diamond.
Photonic sources are one of the most important enabling technologies for quantum technologies.
Random Number Generators (RNG) produce sequences of random numbers. Random numbers are essential for a number of applications: encrypted data transmission uses random numbers as secret keys, gambling machines need them, some numerical methods rely on them, and Quantum Key Distribution also requires them.
Some quantum computers are programmed in a way that is very different from running a classical programming language, one command after the other. These are called adiabatic quantum computers or quantum annealers.
The concept of quantum key distribution (QKD) was first proposed in the 1970s but it wasn’t until the 1980s that it really came to light. The idea was incredibly simple yet it still took until the 1990s, when the connection was made to entanglement, that physicists started to get really interested.
Distributing quantum resources such as entanglement and qubits over long distance fibre optic networks represents an enormous challenge. If we send single photons over 1000km, even at rates of 10GHz, we would need to wait hundreds of years to detect just one, due to loss in the fibre. Not very practical!
This is arguable one of the most beautiful ideas in quantum physics. To get passed the standard joke, this is not the teleportation one sees in science fiction like Star Trek, where people are transported from one place to another without ever being anywhere in between.
Quantum devices often look very different from their classical counterparts. There is one exception - the central piece of some of the most advanced quantum computers is still a chip.
The laws of quantum mechanics govern the behavior of small objects, such as single electrons or atoms. Atoms are not only an ideal system to study quantum mechanics, they are also core building blocks of many Quantum Technologies.
Classical physics discriminates between particles and waves. The former have matter and are affected by forces in their behaviour, the latter do not have mass and have the exclusive ability to superimpose with one another.
