An Exaltation of Qubits
Watercolour, crayon and Photoshop™
©2014 Charlene Brown
Exaltation is my favourite
collective noun. Though only properly used for larks, as far as I know, this
arrangement of quantum bits, or qubits, seemed to warrant it… BTW, the
arrangement, with X-axes converging dramatically, has nothing to do with how
quantum computing works – it just made a nice composition.
Quantum computing is immensely powerful,
or will be when someone gets some qubits to stand still long enough, because
qubits can store and process practically infinite amounts of information… A
classical bit can either be a 0 or a 1, a qubit is any possible combination or
superposition of ket 0 and ket 1, the bra-ket notation
used for describing quantum states, with complex numbers as coefficients of the
superposition. Thus, a qubit in a quantum computer is represented as any point
on the surface of a 3D sphere, the Bloch Sphere. Not only can each qubit be in
such a superposition state, but the system as a whole can be in a superposition
of every combination of different states of all the qubits. The number of
possible states that can be present in the superposition is huge – N qubits would
have 2N possible states. The qubits in the picture are shown with a random
array of some of the simpler Bloch Sphere states, including ket 0 (top, left) and ket 1 (bottom left) and various points on the
X, Y or Z axes.
