Quantum hits the big time

Those differences are a mixed bag. True, there are approaches you can't take with a quantum computer, but there are also powerful new strategies available to these exotic devices, according to Travis Humble, an ORNL Distinguished Scientist and director of the Quantum Science Center.

"Imagine you've got a calculator," he said. "The buttons on that calculator are pretty limited. You've got plus, minus, multiply, divide, equal, not much more than that. But with the quantum computer, now we've added more buttons to that calculator, buttons that simply could not have existed otherwise, and people are trying to figure out, 'What's that button do?'"

Two examples of these new buttons are the controlled NOT gate, which changes the state of one qubit based on the value of another, and the Hadamard gate, which takes a qubit that has a definite value and changes it to a superposition of two values.

Humble noted that quantum computing is useful in materials research, particularly research on quantum materials. This is an especially difficult area for traditional supercomputers, also known as high-performance computers.

"What is interesting about quantum materials is that predicting their quirky behavior is a hard problem for our high-performance computing methods," Humble said. "And quantum computers look like they'll be a natural solution to solving those systems because they're quantum."