Physicists have sketched a blueprint for building a quantum computer using existing technology that would be powerful enough to crack important and currently unsolvable problems, such as factoring enormous numbers.
Such a machine would need to be larger than a football pitch and would cost at least £100 million (US$126 million) to make, its designers say.
“Yes it will be big, yes it will be expensive — but it absolutely can be built right now,” says quantum physicist Winfried Hensinger of the University of Sussex, UK, who leads the team that published the blueprint in a paper in Science Advances1 on 1 February.
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