Abstract
Quantum computation is everywhere in the news— there is a lot of excitement, a long time promise for a technological revolution, and quite a bit of hype. In this talk, I’ll try to give my take on some basic questions: What are quantum computers, and why do they attract so much attention from industry and academia alike? What are those “exponential quantum advantages,” and what might we actually do with large quantum computers, once they are built? Importantly, however, Quantum computation is not just about technological advancements -- it has fundamentally changed how we think about many-body quantum physics. I’ll try to give a glimpse of some of these ideas, including the mind-bending concept of quantum error correction, new perspectives on the transition from quantum to classical physics, and even a broader way of thinking about what a quantum experiment is. I’ll end by discussing the main challenges the field is facing today, and by venturing a (somewhat risky) guess about when quantum computing might finally live up to its promise. My hope is to give a taste not only of the state of the art of this exciting technology, but also of the truly deep scientific ideas that underlie this fascinating subject.