Illustrating quantum computing is always a challenge. Information theory, optic benches and quantum weirdness don’t lend themselves easily to beautiful illustrations. But that was the task given to us by the “Institut für Quantenoptik und Quanteninformation” at the University of Vienna, for their paper which has been accepted into Science.
Their paper describes a method of “Blind Quantum Computing”. In a world where Quantum Computers are large, expensive, and are used to process sensitive data (e.g. financial transactions, secure communications), the authors anticipate that it will be necessary to perform these computations remotely, on a third party’s computer. Blind computing involves encoding your data in such a way that they can be encrypted, sent, processed while encrypted, the result sent back and then the result decrypted. At all stages on the remote computer the data are hidden and secure. The paper describes and demonstrates a method for performing such a series of operations using quantum-entangled clusters of qubits.
