andidate technologies, and probably the farthest along by most measures. The Wineland group in particular has been working on this stuff for better than twenty years, and they’ve got a lot of the bugs worked out, or at least identified.
They’re not ready to make an ion-based quantum computer yet, and the complexity needed for a large system might mean that it never will be the basis for a practical computer. Ion traps are the best test and demonstration system we have at the moment, and they’re likely to remain so for the forseeable future.
If they were running for President, they would be: Joe Biden. They’ve been around forever, and are a central part of the quantum computing establishment. They may not be the most exciting candidate out there, but nobody doubts that they could get the job done.
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