Technical Challenges in Quantum Computing and the Problem of Scale

Quantum computing - it’s such a buzz word now and everyone is talking about it for what it might be able to do decades off in the future. And while these futuristic conversations about quantum computing are interesting and inspiring, they are not realistic, because before we get to this point where quantum computing can accomplish all these crazy feats, we first need to solve all the technical problems that limit large scale adoption of quantum computing. And there are a lot of technical problems. Decoherence, low malleability and the extremely cold temperatures quantum computers operate at are massive technical problems that must be solved before we can even think about quantum computers taking over the world. So in this episode, we talk with Nick Johnson, a trapped-ion physicist and quantum engineer at Riverlane, about the problem of scaling quantum computing, and these hard technical problems with quantum computing. Nick holds a PhD in physics from the university of Sussex where he researched a scalable demonstrator for trapped-ion quantum computing using modules connected by electric fields.