Quantum computing: No turning back

Anton Zeilinger and colleagues (University of Vienna, Austria) take Robert Raussendorf and Hans Briegel’s ideas for computing, based on highly entangled clusters of many particles - in this case photons - and demonstrate that modifications to the entangled photons in such a state allows them to perform certain computing tasks. The entangled photons allow the system to encode information before computations begin and imprint a quantum logic circuit on the state, destroying its entanglement and making the process irreversible. Hence the name ‘one-way quantum computing’ for the system.

This article reports the first experimental demonstration of the one-way quantum computer, which radically changes how we think about quantum physics and opens up exciting possibilities for the experimental implementation of quantum computation.