EE Times is reporting that Harvard Lecturer Ronald Walsworth led a group that was able to successfully store and retrieve data into a quantum state. This is signifigant because reading quantum data alters what was stored, so it is rather evident if someone else has read the data, or that once you read it, no one else can.
Walsworth himself says, “We are one step closer to the first practical application of quantum information processing. Today we can nondestructively transfer information from light to the spin state of atoms, then transfer it back out into the same light beam, while preserving all the original phase information.” Meanwhile, the article itself tries to draw a larger, rosier picture for us saying that the researchers are “attempting to harness quantum mechanics to create uncrackable codes, photonic quantum memories and eventually, blazingly fast quantum supercomputers.”
Personally, I think much of the promise of quantum computers lays in security, and specialized algorithms like Shore’s Factoring Algorithm, and that we won’t see a speed up in general applications for a long time (50 years).
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