Nanotechnology Now Our NanoNews Digest Sponsors Home > Press > Quantum Optimization: Computer scientist Yufei Ding receives NSF Early CAREER Award to advance efforts to improve quantum applications Abstract: The key to the incredible speed of a quantum computer lies in its ability to fabricate and manipulate quantum bits, or qubits, typically artificial particles such as ions, superconducting oscillators or protons. Quantum properties allow qubits to form entanglement, a phenomenon that provides far more processing power than the binary bits that drive todays classical computers. Specially designed quantum algorithms, which are lists of operations analogous to a cooking recipe that tell a computer to do something can further speed up calculations to accelerate scientific advances.