Recent advances in quantum computing are making this technology ever more relevant to industrial applications. Quantum computing makes direct use of quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on entangled quantum bits (qubits), i.e., information stored in quantum states. Superconducting circuits are relatively easy to manufacture with current technologies and are thus promising candidates to further scale quantum information technologies. In the near term, a small quantum computer, based on a couple of hundreds of superconducting qubits with error mitigation or limited error correction, will be able to solve mathematical problems intractable to conventional computers.
Possible applications on quantum machines include the solving of hard optimization problems that are beyond the reach of classical algorithms. For example, quantum optimizations based on the variational principle are particularly appealing. Applications to quantum chemistry, metrology tasks, or efficient error-syndrome measurements in error correction codes can notably be contemplated.
See also Patent protection of quantum computing.
