So the field of quantum information is
quite new. Quantum mechanics is not
new I mean
everything that people are excited about
now
they could have understood in 1927 or
28 when quantum mechanics, the present
theory quantum mechanics was
more or less fully formulated and,
but quantum mechanics is sufficiently
bizarre
and counter-intuitive and has such
unexpected implications that people
still don't fully understand it and
starting about 20
years ago people began to realize that
the weird laws of quantum mechanics
could allow you to do
computations that are impossible or
impossible to do quickly on a classical
computer. So that's interesting just
from a
theoretical point of view but it turns
out that these ideas now are
from quantum information are have, are
spreading out into other areas of physics
and having an impact on things that have
nothing to do with
trying to build a quantum computer. So
for example
people who study
condensed matter systems magnets and superconductors
systems where there are many, many
particles. Let's say many, many electrons
it's very difficult to solve
a quantum mechanics, to solve the extraordinary
equation and predict ahead of time what phenomenon 
will arise. Especially, when the
particles are strongly interacting like
the electrons are repelling each other because
of the coolum forces but
with the greater understanding of
the information content in
quantum-mechanical
states, people are understanding now
much more efficient ways to program
classical computers
to describe or compute and make
predictions about
the complicated quantum states
of real physical systems containing
many strongly interacting electrons.
These ideas are now
actually making connections to cosmology
and general relativity in a completely
surprising and
unexpected way. There's a great deal of work
here in Waterloo at the Perimeter
Institute
on these developments.
Also, even before building a quantum
computer just some of the ideas about quantum
information processing are now helping us build better atomic clocks, more precise clocks
and you know read the time
from those clocks much more
accurately than we could in the past
based on new ideas about how to transfer
the information in a quantum state from
the atoms in the clock to other atoms
which are your readout device. So the,
it's still quite unclear whether we can
actually build
a large-scale quantum computer and it's
not even completely clear
what such a machine would be good for. We
know certain
tasks that it could carry out very
rapidly but it's already clear that the
intellectual effort
around this goal of building a
quantum computer has led to
side benefits to several areas of
physics so its a very
exciting time for
both theorists and experimentalists.
You know we're in a situation now
where
things kind of work we've made lots of
progress we can
manipulate the quantum states of two
and three and four
superconducting quantum bits but we need
to develop tool boxes and build
little modules of few qubits that can
very reliably
carry out certain tasks. Then we have to
develop the protocol for communicating
the quantum information between such modules
in some fault tolerant way and
you could think about scaling up
some of the current designs
but we know if you built a million
of them
it's not going to work. You could think
about perfecting the little module with
two or three
quantum bits until it's really working
but if you
forget about, if you forget that when
you're done it has to be able to
communicate with other parts of the
system
you may find you went up a blind alley.
So it's
very, very tricky to when the, when the
details of the technology have not yet
been settled
to think about how you're going to scale
this thing
up. So it's a, it's a very interesting
engineering challenge.
