quantum computing timeline - the 90s.

For me, the 90's was exciting. Macarena song was number 1 song in polarity. Here is a snapshot of that era while reading the post.

The 90s were exciting time. The Macarena was #1 on most popular music chart, but at the same time 1991, Artur Ekert at the University of Oxford, proposes entanglement-based secure communication.

1993

Dan Simon, at Université de Montréal, invents an oracle problem for which a quantum computer would be exponentially faster than a conventional computer. This algorithm introduces the main ideas which were then developed in Peter Shor's factorization algorithm.

1994

Peter Shor, at AT&T's Bell Labs in New Jersey, discovers an important algorithm. It allows a quantum computer to factor large integers quickly. It solves both the factoring problem and the discrete log problem. Shor's algorithm can theoretically break many of the cryptosystems in use today. Its invention sparked a tremendous interest in quantum computers.

First United States Government workshop on quantum computing is organized by NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in autumn.

Isaac Chuang and Yoshihisa Yamamoto propose a quantum-optical realization of a quantum computer to implement Deutsch's algorithm.[20] Their work introduces dual-rail encoding for photonic qubits.

In December, Ignacio Cirac, at University of Castilla-La Mancha at Ciudad Real, and Peter Zoller at the University of Innsbruck propose an experimental realization of the controlled-NOT gate with cold trapped ions.

1995

The first United States Department of Defense workshop on quantum computing and quantum cryptography is organized by United States Army physicists Charles M. Bowden, Jonathan P. Dowling, and Henry O. Everitt; it takes place in February at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Peter Shor proposes the first schemes for quantum error correction.

Christopher Monroe and David Wineland at NIST (Boulder, Colorado) experimentally realize the first quantum logic gate – the controlled-NOT gate – with trapped ions, following the Cirac-Zoller proposal.

1996

Lov Grover, at Bell Labs, invents the quantum database search algorithm. The quadratic speedup is not as dramatic as the speedup for factoring, discrete logs, or physics simulations. However, the algorithm can be applied to a much wider variety of problems. Any problem that has to be solved by random, brute-force search, can take advantage of this quadratic speedup (in the number of search queries).

The United States Government, particularly in a joint partnership of the Army Research Office (now part of the Army Research Laboratory) and the National Security Agency, issues the first public call for research proposals in quantum information processing.

Andrew Steane designs Steane codes for error correction.

David P. DiVincenzo, from IBM, proposes a list of minimal requirements for creating a quantum computer

1997

David Cory, Amr Fahmy and Timothy Havel, and at the same time Neil Gershenfeld and Isaac L. Chuang at MIT publish the first papers realizing gates for quantum computers based on bulk nuclear spin resonance, or thermal ensembles. The technology is based on a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machine, which is similar to the medical magnetic resonance imaging machine.

Alexei Kitaev describes the principles of topological quantum computation as a method for combating decoherence.

Daniel Loss and David P. DiVincenzo propose the Loss-DiVincenzo quantum computer, using as qubits the intrinsic spin-1/2 degree of freedom of individual electrons confined to quantum dots.

1998

First experimental demonstration of a quantum algorithm. A working 2-qubit NMR quantum computer is used to solve Deutsch's problem by Jonathan A. Jones and Michele Mosca at Oxford University and shortly after by Isaac L. Chuang at IBM's Almaden Research Center and Mark Kubinec and the University of California, Berkeley together with coworkers at Stanford University and MIT.

First working 3-qubit NMR computer.

Bruce Kane proposes a silicon based nuclear spin quantum computer, using nuclear spins of individual phosphorus atoms in silicon as the qubits and donor electrons to mediate the coupling between qubits.

First execution of Grover's algorithm on an NMR computer.

Hidetoshi Nishimori & colleagues from Tokyo Institute of Technology showed that quantum annealing algorithm can perform better than classical simulated annealing.

Daniel Gottesman and Emanuel Knill independently prove that a certain subclass of quantum computations can be efficiently emulated with classical resources (Gottesman–Knill theorem).

1999

Samuel L. Braunstein and his team show that none of the bulk NMR experiments performed to date contained any entanglement, the quantum states being too strongly mixed. This is seen as evidence that NMR computers would likely not yield a benefit over classical computers. It remains an open question, however, whether entanglement is necessary for quantum computational speedup.

Gabriel Aeppli, Thomas Felix Rosenbaum and colleagues demonstrate experimentally the basic concepts of quantum annealing in a condensed matter system.

Yasunobu Nakamura and Jaw-Shen Tsai demonstrate that a superconducting circuit can be used as a qubit.

I will cover the events of 2000 -2010 here