Quantum computers have rapidly advanced from laboratory curiosities to full-fledged systems operating with dozens of interacting information carriers called qubits. In 2019, researchers at Google became the first to demonstrate quantum supremacy1—a quantum computer capable of calculations that are impossible for conventional devices—by using just over 50 qubits.
Researchers are now on the threshold of being able to deploy quantum computers to solve a host of critical problems ranging from pharmaceutical drug discovery and industrial chemistry to codebreaking and information security. (For more on quantum cryptography, see the article by Marcos Curty, Koji Azuma, and Hoi-Kwong Lo on page 36 of this issue.) Because of ongoing developments in computational heuristics and approximate quantum algorithms, quantum computers may well be able to solve commercially relevant problems with some computational benefit, reaching what’s known as quantum advantage, within the next decade.
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