It is a sunny Tuesday morning in late March at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. The corridor from the reception area follows the long, curving glass curtain-wall that looks out over the visitors' parking lot to leafless trees covering a distant hill in Yorktown Heights, New York, an hour north of Manhattan. Walk past the podium from the "Jeopardy!" episodes at which IBM's Watson smote the human champion of the TV quiz show, turn right into a hallway, and you will enter a windowless lab where a quantum computer is chirping away.
Actually, "chirp" isn't quite the right word. It is a somewhat metallic sound, chush — chush — chush, that is made by the equipment that lowers the temperature inside a so-called dilution refrigerator to within hailing distance of absolute zero. Encapsulated in a white canister suspended from a frame, the dilution refrigerator cools a superconducting chip studded with a handful of quantum bits, or qubits.
Quantum computing has been around, in theory if not in practice, for several decades. But these new types of machines, designed to harness quantum mechanics and potentially process unimaginable amounts of data, are certifiably a big deal. "I would argue that a working quantum computer is perhaps the most sophisticated technology that humans have ever built," said Chad Rigetti, founder and chief executive officer of Rigetti Computing, a startup in Berkeley, Calif. Quantum computers, he says, harness nature at a level we became aware of only about 100 years ago — one that isn't apparent to us in everyday life.
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