Posted by SInce the last decade, there’s something in the media that has been getting a lot of attention: Quantum Technologies. In 2016, the Quantum Manifesto was written in the European Commission for gathering funding and investments in the development of quantum technologies throughout the Europe. In 2018, the European Union has release the Quantum Flagship to be an umbrella project with a 10 billion euro budget for developing research in those areas.
Quantum technologies has a lot of applications for a lot of fields of knowledge: for us from IT, we could highlight the Quantum Computation and the Quantum Communications (Quantum Cryptography included), but there are other fields like medicine, sensing and simulation that requires a quantum precision and capability, so we’re not alone in this interesting field.
Usually when we talk about “Quantum”, the marketing of the word comes out: from quantum esoterics to quantum coaching, but it’s nothing related to that. Rather, I always use an interesting comparision: “Quantum physics is like classical physics, but smaller”. The interesting point is that it’s actually untrue! Quantum mechanics is way different from what we are used to deal with classical physics: most of things we intuitively assume doesn’t apply to materia and movement when we’re dealing with reeeally small things.
So, when we start dealing with quantum physics, we have a broader application range then when we deal only with the classical physics, since we can work on new properties of materia. One good example of that is Schrödinger’s Superposition State: A quantum particle can be in more than one state at the same time, and we won’t know which state it’s in until we make a measurement to the system. But here’s another interesting property in quantum physics: once we do the measurement, we invariably will change the state of the system, so repeated measurements will lead to different results. That’s called Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
Dealing with those properties will allow new applications to our technologies. We can use superstate in computation to make several calculations at once with less bits, what makes the quantum computation a lot faster than the classical computation. The Heisenberg principle is interesting for us to identify an eavesdropper in a quantum communication channel, since it will invariably modify the state of communication.
That’s all for now, Folks!
Next posts in this topic will be related to some principles in quantum computation =) As I said earlier (Getting back to work!) the posts will be smaller and with a longer wait between then, but that will make it possible for me to keep an posting schedule =)
Cya!