11 - Applications of entanglement: Heisenberg-limited interferometry and quantum information processing

Summary

“All information is physical”, the slogan advocated over many years by Rolf Landauer of IBM, has recently led to some remarkable changes in the way we view communications, computing and cryptography. By employing quantum physics, several objectives that were thought impossible in a classical world have now proven to be possible. Quantum communications links, for example, become impossible to eavesdrop without detection. Quantum computers (were they to be realized) could turn some algorithms that are labelled “difficult” for a classical machine, no matter how powerful, into ones that become “simple”. The details of what constitutes “difficult” and what “easy” are the subject of mathematical complexity theory, but an example here will illustrate the point and the impact that quantum information processors will have on all of us. The security of many forms of encryption is predicated on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. Finding the factors of a 1024-digit number would take longer than the age of the universe on a computer designed according to the laws of classical physics, and yet can be done in the blink of an eye on a quantum computer were it to have a comparable clock speed. But only if we can build one, and that's the challenge! No one has yet realized a quantum register of the necessary size, or quantum gates with the prerequisite accuracy. Yet it is worth the chase, as a quantum computer with a modest-sized register could out-perform any classical machine.