Not very long ago was a time when people used to share the computing devices (computers) among themselves. For example, in home we used to have a single computer which was shared by all our brothers & sisters! In professional environment also, computer was not a necessity. But today most individuals own atleast 2-3 personal high speed computing devices - smart phone, laptop, tablet etc. In professional environment also the requirement of a computer is a must. With the emergence of internet and advent in technology, the computing need of the world has experienced a very sharp surge in over last couple of decades. Increasing computing need has put the pressure on engineers to continually innovate in semiconductor technologies and build faster digital computing devices. But today there is another area which is being explored quite heavily to achieve faster computing, it is called Quantum Computing! Quantum Computing Devices or Quantum Computers have the potential to perform calculations significantly faster than our digital computers.

Quantum computer is a computer that harnesses the power of atoms or molecules to perform memory and processing task. It performs calculations based on law of quantum mechanics, which is the behaviour of participles at sub atomic level. Every computer performs calculations by manipulating information. Digital Computer has 'Bit' as a basic unit of information and it can have two values either '1' or '0'. Combinations of these 'Bits' forms the information in digital computers.

In Quantum Computers the basic unit of information is 'Qubit' or 'Quantum Bit'. Many physical objects can be used as Qubits, such as atoms, photons, or electrons. Qubit has two very peculiar properties. A) Superposition – Qubit can set itself to 0 and 1 at the same time. B) Entanglement – Qubit can interact with other Qubits to compound the ability of superposition. Its means 3 entangled 'Qubits' can store and process as much as 8 'Bit' of data in digital computer similarly 10 entangled Qubit can store and process 1024 Bit of data hence making them a very fast computing platform.

Though the field of quantum computer is not new as it initiated in 1980s, and today scientists have built basic quantum computers that can perform certain calculations but the practical quantum computer is still years away. There is a lot of theoretical and practical research going on in this area to make this technology practically viable.

Quantum computers is a next era of computing and has a tremendous potential in future applications like making safer airplanes, discovering distant plants, medical applications to build computational models to determine how some of the fatal diseases like cancer etc. develop, self driving automobiles, precision weather forecasting which will prevent causalities due to natural calamities etc.

By- Sagar Juneja, Research Associate, Chitkara University & Avik Seth, Third year ECE Student Chitkara University, Punjab

References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing