There is still plenty of room at the bottom : Feynman's vision of quantum computing 65 years later

Abstract

In 1959, Nobelist Richard Feynman gave a talk titled "There's plenty of room at the bottom", in which he emphasized that, to drastically speed up computations, we need to make computer components much smaller - all the way to the size of molecules, atoms, and even elementary particles. At this level, physics is no longer described by deterministic Newton's mechanics, it is described by probabilistic quantum laws. Because of this, computer designers started thinking about how to design a reliable computer based on non-deterministic elements - and this thinking eventually led to the modern ideas and algorithms of quantum computing. So,we have a straight path of speeding up computations: by learning how to use molecules, atoms, and then elementary particles as building blocks of a computational device. But what if we reach the size of an elementary particle? At first glance, it may seem that we will then reach an absolute limit of how fast a computer can be. However, as we show in this paper, we can potentially speed up computations even further - by using the internal structure of elementary particles, e.g., the fact that protons and neutrons consist of quarks. Interestingly, the corresponding mathematics is very similar to what is called color optical computing - the use of light of different colors in computations.