Advancing Quantum Computing to Accelerate Scientific Research - Q4Q team

Since it emerged in the 1980s, quantum computing has promised to transform how we process information. The technology is centred on the fact that quantum particles – such as electrons – exist in ‘superpositions’ of states.

On classical computers, the basic unit of information is a bit, which takes on the binary values 0 or 1.

On quantum computers, quantum bits (also known as ‘qubits’) are the information carriers. Much like bits, we read binary outcomes of 0 or 1 for each qubit.

However, in contrast to bits, qubits can exist in the form of superposition of logical values 0 and 1. This means we can encode much more information in a qubit. Within a collection of qubits, superposition also leads to quantum correlations among qubits, which are stronger than correlations within a collection of bits. Superposition and strong correlations are how quantum computers can provide extremely fast processing speeds.