Quantiki

Hamish Johnston writes at PhysicsWorld: ''A small firm based in Canada that aims to build a commercially viable quantum computer has shown that an important part of its technology works. D-Wave Systems, which was spun-out of the University of British Columbia in 1999, has shown that a technique called quantum annealing can be used to make eight coupled quantum bits – or qubits – find their ground state.

Professor Immanuel Bloch, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Professor for experimental physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, has been elected by the EPS for the “2011 Prize for Fundamental Aspects of Quantum Electronics and Optics”. The award is given to him for his “pioneering work on exploring quantum many-body systems using ultracold quantum gases for quantum simulation and quantum information applications.”
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ID Quantique SA announced the successful completion of the longest running project for testing Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) in a field environment. The main goal of the SwissQuantum network, installed in the Geneva metropolitan area in March 2009, was to validate the reliability and robustness of QKD in continuous operation over a long time period in a field environment. The quantum layer ran stably for nearly 2 years until the completion of the project in January 2011, confirming the viability of QKD as a commercial encryption technology.

John Matson at his Scientific American blog write: ''Quantum information science is a bit like classroom management—the larger the group, the harder it is to keep everything together. But to build a practical quantum computer physicists will need many particles working in synchrony as quantum bits, or quibits. <!--break-->Each qubit can be a 0 and a 1 simultaneously, vaulting the number-crunching power of a hypothetical quantum computer well past that of ordinary computers.