Quantum computing

Yael Tauman Kalai’s breakthroughs secure our digital world, from cloud computing to our quantum future.

Quantum algorithms can find their way out of mazes exponentially faster than classical ones, at the cost of forgetting the path they took. A new result suggests that the trade-off may be inevitable.

In two landmark experiments, researchers used quantum processors to engineer exotic particles that have captivated physicists for decades. The work is a step toward crash-proof quantum computers.

A new phase of matter called a “time crystal” plays with our expectations of thermodynamics. The physicist Vedika Khemani talks with Steven Strogatz about its surprising quantum behavior.

Last fall, a team of physicists announced that they had teleported a qubit through a holographic wormhole in a quantum computer. Now another group suggests that’s not quite what happened.

The quantum energy teleportation protocol was proposed in 2008 and largely ignored. Now two independent experiments have shown that it works.

Two teams have made photons act as if time were simultaneously flowing in two directions. The experiments demonstrate a way to potentially boost the performance of quantum devices.

Random circuit sampling, a popular technique for showing the power of quantum computers, doesn’t scale up if errors go unchecked.

Computer scientists this year learned how to transmit perfect secrets, why transformers seem so good at everything, and how to improve on decades-old algorithms (with a little help from AI).