Quantum computing fundamentalsAll computing systems rely on a fundamental ability to store and manipulate information. Current computers manipulate individual bits, which store information as binary 0 and 1 states. Quantum computers leverage quantum mechanical phenomena to manipulate information. To do this, they rely on quantum bits, or qubits.Here, learn about the quantum properties leveraged by qubits, how they’re used to compute, and how quantum systems scale.Enterprise-wide Access, AnytimeIBM Quantum provides cloud-based software for your team to acess our quantum computers anytime. No matter how big your team is, large or small, IBM Quantum Experience platform is ready to support your team as they explore the potential of quantumQuantum computing is the use of quantum-mechanical phenomena such as superposition and entanglement to perform computation. Computers that perform quantum computation are known as a quantum computers.[1]:I-5 Quantum computers are believed to be able to solve certain computational problems, such as integer factorization (which underlies RSA encryption), significantly faster than classical computers. The study of quantum computing is a subfield of quantum information science.Quantum computing began in the early 1980s, when physicist Paul Benioff proposed a quantum mechanical model of the Turing machine.[2] Richard Feynman and Yuri Manin later suggested that a quantum computer had the potential to simulate things that a classical computer could not.[3][4] In 1994, Peter Shor developed a quantum algorithm for factoring integers that had the potential to decrypt RSA-encrypted communications.[5] Despite ongoing experimental progress since the late 1990s, most researchers believe that “fault-tolerant quantum computing [is] still a rather distant dream”.[6] In recent years, investment into quantum computing research has increased in both the public and private sector.[7][8] On 23 October 2019, Google AI, in partnership with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), published a paper in which they claimed to have achieved quantum supremacy.[9] While some have disputed this claim, it is still a significant milestone in the history of quantum computing.[10]Quantum computing is modeled by quantum circuits. Quantum circuits are based on the quantum bit, or “qubit”, which is somewhat analogous to the bit in classical computation. Qubits can be in a 1 or 0 quantum state, or they can be in a superposition of the 1 and 0 states. However, when qubits are measured the result is always either a 0 or a 1; the probabilities of these two outcomes depend on the quantum state that they were in immediately prior to the measurement. Computation is performed by manipulating qubits with quantum logic gates, which are somewhat analogous to classical logic gates.There are currently two main approaches to physically implementing a quantum computer: analog and digital. Analog approaches are further divided into quantum simulation, quantum annealing, and adiabatic quantum computation. Digital quantum computers use quantum logic gates to do computation. Both approaches use quantum bits or qubits.[1]:2–13
