The world’s 100 foremost thinkers in the field of quantum computing will gather at DePaul University from Jan. 18 to 22 to discuss the scientific theories behind what may become the next generation of ultra-fast computers.

Sponsored by DePaul’s School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems (CTI), the invitation-only Second Workshop on Algorithms in Quantum Information Processing (AQIP) will bring together leading computer scientists who research quantum computing at universities and national laboratories in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Among the more prominent attendees will be Paul Benioff, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, considered one of the fathers of quantum computing, and Peter Shor, an AT&T Labs researcher who has performed ground-breaking work in the field.

"Using the current technology, we are reducing the size of computer chips by half every few years," said Andre J. Berthiaume, a CTI assistant professor and conference chair. "Pretty soon, the chip’s components will only be a few atoms across, and at that level, the old rules of electronics no longer apply. We need the rules of quantum mechanics to break that barrier."

A relatively new field, quantum computing is based on the principles of quantum mechanics, a branch of physics that focuses on subatomic particles. With current computing, a bit is either 1 or 0, but in quantum computing a bit "can be both 1 and 0 and shades in between," explained Berthiaume. As a result, a quantum computer could work on many complex problems in parallel, revolutionizing the speed and efficiency of computing.

"If you put all the computers in the world together to work on a complicated factoring problem, they could not solve it as fast as a quantum computer could," said Berthiaume, who is the first person ever to do a doctoral dissertation on the subject of quantum computing.

Faster factoring would have a major impact on the field of public key cryptography, the technology that uses factoring to safeguard Internet commerce, including on-line credit card transactions, he said.

John Rogers, a CTI assistant professor who researches quantum computing and is co-hosting the conference with Berthiaume, likens the present state of quantum computer study to that of transistor research in 1957. To date, two physicists from the Los Alamos Institute have come the closest to an actual working quantum computer model, creating a device three or four quantum bits across and using it to solve a problem in quantum fashion, Rogers said.

Common use is decades away, and even then, quantum computers will likely be "small gizmos able to do one task, to solve one problem—most likely factoring," Berthiaume said "But people have been trying to factor numbers more efficiently for 400 years."

During the five-day workshop, which will be held in the DePaul Center, 1 E. Jackson Blvd., participants will hear from 26 different speakers while having ample time for informal collaboration and socialization as they map out the future of their field. "These kind of people are very rarely together in one place, so hosting an important international conference like this at DePaul is a major coup," Rogers said.

More information on the conference is available on the web page: http://aqip.cs.depaul.edu/aqip.