We’ve all heard people refer to the European countries that are in financial trouble as the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland or Italy, Greece, and Spain). In the race to build a scalable quantum computer, there are some places that are buzzing with activity, like UCSB (Martinis/Awschalom), Yale (Schoelkopf/Girvin), U. of Wisconsin (Saffman), NIST (Wineland), USTC in China, etc., etc., while there are other places that are a sleepy dullsville. In the dullsville category, the CHIMPS come to mind
C- Caltech
H- Harvard
I- Indian Institute of Technology
M- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
P- Perimeter Institute, and its identical twin, IQC. Oh Canada!
S- Stanford
The amazing thing is that each of these institutions is super-prestigious and has enough scientific intellectual firepower to sink an aircraft carrier, and yet, as far as the race to build a QC is concerned, they are performing at chimp level. Some of them are still working on NMR quantum computers, which are not scalable, and are therefore a dead-end street. Others are working on quantum cryptography and a quantum internet (what a turkey idea! totally pointless and impractical). Others are doing very little in the area of QC experiments. Please correct me if I’m wrong and I’ve missed some recent (in the last 2 years) experimental work done by one of the CHIMPS.
