Abstract

The past 5 years has seen an extraordinary explosion in interest and investment in quantum computing systems and other technological devices based on active quantum components. Major investment from the private sector from Google, IBM, Microsoft, Alibaba and others has solidified quantum computing as a major revolution in IT technology in the 21st century. In this talk I will overview the basic theoretical structures for large scale quantum computers and communications systems. Regardless of the hardware, the models of quantum computing is similar across multiple platforms and we will examine the requirements and challenges for several major hardware systems such as Ion traps, Optics, superconducting systems and donor based systems. Aside for computational systems, many of these hardware models can be adapted to other tasks such as quantum communications. Towards the end of this talk we will also discuss the field of quantum software engineering, how we can program and ultimately operate these machines: a problem that poses serious challenges of its own.