Re:What are companies doing with D-Wave’s quantum hardware?
by dekhn on Monday January 02, 2023 @07:50PM
(#34226031)
Did you mean the photoelectric effect? I think transistors really exploit our understanding of conduction and valence bands of electrons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_band_structure, how to move electrons to the conduction bands, and then bias them so a large current can flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-effect_transistor#Effect...). IIRC part of the nobel for the transistor was because they (Shockley) had built a theoretical model based on QM
There's no (visible) photons involved in silicon computers, although very similar solid state and vacuum tube devices are used to exploit the photoelectric effect, mainly for scientific measurement purposes.
They are not of course, and hopefully the smart people here can clarify what mechanically a "quantum computer" is doing, the best I can figure out is that it can reduce the complex valued quantum state down to a binary state and due to quantum interaction you can compute some things with this. If you asked me, it sounds like massive parallel computation on the atomic level, that is, similar to the way soap bubbles can solve minimal surfaces, but people keep assuring me this is not the case.