Want to muck around with a real quantum computer? Now you can

Quantum computers are expected to transform many facets of science and industry over the next decade or so – but it’s very hard for most potential users to get their hands on one to find out what they can actually do with it. A new open-access facility opened in Queensland this week aims to change that.

The A$10.5 million National Quantum Computing Testbed is located at the University of Queensland and is a collaborative effort led by research teams from the university and CSIRO.

It will allow researchers from academia and industry to test new ideas on a real quantum processor in an affordable and fully open access environment. As such, it removes many of the barriers to innovation in this rapidly developing field.

From bits to qubits

Everyday classical computing, like the kind that runs our laptops or mobile phones, stores and processes data in the forms of bits. These are are binary numbers – for example, combinations of 0s and 1s. Each bit can be either 0 or 1 at any given time.

Quantum computing, however, stores and processes information as quantum bits – otherwise known as qubits. These exploit special properties of quantum physics to create what are known as “superposition” states.