Integrated quantum photonics
As the field has progressed new quantum algorithms have been developed which provide short and long term routes towards the demonstration of the superiority of quantum computers over their classical counterparts. Cluster state computation is now generally accepted as the approach that will be used to develop a fully fledged quantum computer. Whilst development of quantum computer will require the synthesis of many different aspects of integrated optics, boson sampling seeks to demonstrate the power of quantum computation via technologies readily available and is therefore a very promising near term algorithm to doing so. In fact shortly after its proposal there were several small scale experimental demonstrations of the boson sampling algorithm
Physics of computation
The study of the physics of computation relates to understanding the fundamental physical limits of computers. This field has led to the investigation of how thermodynamics limits information processing, the understanding of chaos and dynamical systems, and a rapidly growing effort to invent new quantum computers.