“To get the quantum computer going, press F5 twice”

The pace of our time is set in Braunschweig. Normal quartz watches go wrong by a few seconds a month, whereas today’s atomic clocks only deviate from the ideal time by one second after 100 million years.

Four atomic clocks are running at the Physikalisch Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), and the scientists are now working on the next generation that is a hundred times more accurate. The heart of these optical clocks is an ion trap in which charged atoms are trapped with an electromagnetic field and controlled with the help of lasers.

For the layman, the traps look like small computer chips on a gold-plated circuit board – and that’s exactly how they should also be used in the future. “While working on optical clocks, we developed a lot of technology that we are now using to construct a quantum computer,” says Piet Schmidt, director of the Quest Institute at PTB.