QUANTUM COMPUTING (Syllabus: GS Paper 3 – S&T)

Context: India launched the National Quantum Mission last year and became one of the few countries in the world to have a dedicated programme to harness the power of quantum technologies.

Quantum Computing:

• It is an emerging field that harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics to build powerful tools to process information.
• It has the potential to solve computational problems that are beyond the reach of classical computers.
• Classical computers can only encode information in bits that take the value of 1 or 0. This restricts their ability.
• Quantum computing, on the other hand, uses quantum bits or qubits that have special properties that help them solve complex problems much faster than classical bits.
• One of these properties is superposition i.e instead of holding one binary value (0 or 1) like a classical bit, a qubit can hold a combination of 0 or 1, simultaneously.
• Unlike a usual bit, they can also store much more information than just 1 or 0, because they can exist in any superposition of these value.

Quantum Supremacy

• In 2019 Google announced that it had achieved "Quantum Supremacy", meaning that they had used a quantum computer to quickly solve a problem within 200 seconds that a conventional computer would take an impractically long time (10, 000 years) to solve.
• Google’s quantum computer is called Sycamore.

Applications: Communication satellites, MRI scanners, Atomic clocks, Electron microscopes, Solar cells, LASERS etc.

Govt. initiatives: National mission on quantum technologies and applications, QuEST, QKD solution, QSim project, Quantum communication lab by C-DOT.