Let's build a quantum computer!

Google recently announced that it will partner up with John Martinis -one of the leading researchers on superconducting quantum computing- to build a working quantum processor. This announcement has sparked a lot of renewed interest in a topic that was mainly of academic interest before. So, if Google thinks it's worth the hassle to build quantum computers then there surely must be something about them after all? With this talk, I want to provide a better understanding of why quantum computing is interesting and how we might actually build a working quantum computer one day. As an example, I will discuss the two-qubit chip that I built during my PhD thesis as a realization of a basic, functional two-qubit quantum processor. I will explain the building blocks of this processor and show how we can manipulate the qubits, read out their state with high fidelity and couple them to each other in order to realize two-qubit gate operations. I will then show how we used this processor to demonstrate the concept of "quantum speed-up" by implementing and running the so-called Grover quantum search algorithm on it. Finally, I will give a brief overview of the current state of quantum computing and explain the (likely) approach followed by Google and John Martinis to realize a working, large-scale quantum processor, as well as some problems they will have to overcome on their way.