NOISE IN QUANTUM COMPUTING
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
The wavefunction of an elementary particle has no physical meaning. It can't be measured. This is perhaps a single case where a solution to an equation has no meaning. It has to be further processed by taking a squared magnitude, which gives a probability. That is Born's idea. Why it has to be squared, nobody knows.
The Schrödinger equation can give solutions to a situation that can't exist. For example, take any case from a quantum mechanics textbook, and solve it for energy E, any time t, position x, and any momentum p. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents those cases from existing, but solutions do exist.
I came up with a new idea. Since elementary particles are probabilistic, this generates random quantum noise. The wavefunction of a particle is always in a superposition with random noise. Applying Born's principle to such a particle, one easily notices that there are no solutions to such cases. That's true. A quantum state of any real particle can't be determined. This is not a measurement issue so hotly discussed in the literature. This is one step before that. If the particle exists, its state forever remains unknown. Or, rephrasing that, the Universe prefers to keep its secrets to itself!
The best proof in existence is the fact that quantum computers that attempt to use single electrons or photons do not work. They can't.
The next proof is that a qubit can't be reproducibly initialized to the same state. You can verify it by running examples on any of the existing quantum computing clouds and trying this simple case. x=0, determine x, repeat many times, plot distribution of x. You would expect to get a vertical line; instead, you get some noisy distribution.
The next proof: quantum error correction does not work. You can't correct something that is random in time and that has already occurred. Qubits and quantum gates generate random-in-time noise that can't be eliminated.
In addition, the probability of a particle between zero energy and infinity is continuous. This is more bad news. So-called quantum jumps do not exist; they do, however, exist in quantum mechanics textbooks.
