Welcome to Module 6!

A few weeks ago Koen Bertels started this MOOC with a description of the basic building blocks of a quantum computer. In five modules we went through the first layer of the stack, the quantum chip. We introduced you to many kinds of qubits, and highlighted their potentialities. Spin qubits in quantum dots can be very dense and coherent systems, NV centers in diamond which can be efficiently coupled and manipulated via photons, topological qubits which offer the promise of a much lower sensitivity to noise, and superconducting qubits which represents one of the most advanced platforms today. These are, of course, only some examples of physical realizations of qubits. In the ‘quantum’ community groups are also working with donors, trapped ions, NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) and many other platforms.

In this closing lecture, Menno Veldhorst will start by looking back to what we have seen and discuss how these qubit implementations could be turned into a large scale quantum computer. Finally he will look forward to the next part of the course, where we will go through all the remaining layers of the quantum stack, up to the quantum algorithms.