A fully reprogrammable optical chip capable of processing and directing photons of light along a myriad of preprogrammed pathways in the bowels of quantum computers has been developed jointly by researchers at the University of Bristol, UK, and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), Japan. The creation of a universal “linear optics processor” (linear optics processor, LPU) is one of the main steps towards the creation of real universal quantum computers, capable of high-speed execution of some heavy tasks, such as searching huge databases, the solution of complex mathematical problems of a certain kind, which even the most powerful modern supercomputers “can’t cope”.
Optical processor chip practically removes the main barrier preventing the rapid testing of new technologies and theories from the field of quantum computing. This barrier is the need to rebuild the structure and resource reallocation of quantum computing systems, which takes a very long time due to the extraordinary “fragility” of these systems and their sensitivity to the influence of various environmental factors.
“The significance of the fact of creating a reprogrammable optical processor is hard to overestimate. Now any researcher, taking such a chip, will be able to conduct his own experiments with photons with the same speed and efficiency with which software is developed and debugged on conventional computers. Now quantum computing professionals don’t have to spend many months of their work painstakingly and laboriously building new or reconfiguring existing quantum systems focused on specific tasks or research.”
As a demonstration of the new chip’s capabilities, the researchers put together a series of programs for it to perform various experiments. And, switching the chip from one program to another is done in seconds, unlike the weeks or months it takes to rebuild laboratory quantum systems.
“Once we wrote the code to form a particular quantum-photon circuit, it took us a few seconds to reprogram the chip. At the same time, most of this time was spent on the interaction with the control program, the chip itself switches to a new program within a few milliseconds” – says Jacques Carolan (Jacques Carolan), one of the researchers – “Using the new chip we made in a few hours so many experiments that it would take at least a year in their traditional way.
It should be noted that the University of Bristol is a pioneer in making quantum computing publicly available over the Internet. Their Quantum in the Cloud (QCloud) project provides access to a simple system with two quantum bits, qubits. But, QCloud’s quantum processor capabilities will soon be expanded, most notably with the introduction of new LPU optical processors. “By doing so, many people will be able to discover a whole world of amazing quantum mechanics and quantum computing.”
