Superconducting Applications in Quantum Computation

Superconducting materials could potentially be used to implement a quantum computer, a device that utilizes quantum mechanical properties to produce significantly more powerful processors than we could possibly create in a classical computer. Typically, classical computers are composed of macroscopic integrated circuits made of semi-conducting materials, which are limited by classical mechanics. A quantum computer would be capable of accessing bit states unavailable to classical bits, making them exponentially more powerful.

Background

Bloch sphere depicting the states accessible to a qubit.

Computers perform computations using bits, a fundamental unit of information that is either in the state 1 or 0. One bit may not be particularly powerful but many bits can hold a lot of information; a string of n bits can be in any one of $2^{n}$ states. A Quantum computer would significantly increase computational power by allowing each bit to occupy 1, 0, or any superposition of those two states. This strange phenomenon is possible due to the laws of quantum mechanics, which allow the states of the quantum bits - or qubits - to be transformed in a special way.