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
Centre for Quantum Computation
Initially the CQC was based at the Clarendon Laboratory, but it has now grown to span several departments at the University of Oxford:The Centre has its origins in the early 80's when the computer industry began to worry about the limits of computing. In 1981, Oxford physicist David Deutsch attended a party in Texas given by the famous American physicist John Wheeler who had invited a number of scientists interested in the foundations of computing. It was at this party that Deutsch gained the crucial insight that would lead to an entirely new branch of physics. At the time, computer scientists were turning to Newtonian physics to try to resolve certain fundamental puzzles in the field. But during a conversation at Wheeler’s party, Deutsch realised that this was the wrong approach. Physics is fundamentally governed by quantum theory, and Deutsch could see immediately that using quantum theory instead of Newtonian physics would give a different result. As a consequence of this insight, Deutsch published the paper in 1985 that is now generally regarded as a classic in the field. The paper describes how a computer might run using quantum mechanics and why such a computer is fundamentally different from ordinary computers.