I just received my copy of this book from the future. How do I know it's from the future? It's copyright 2025!We will catch up to the book and join it in 2025 in just a few weeks, but even once we do, an important truth will remain: this book is very nearly perfect. (At least, as far as I can tell after spending only an hour with it.)
The level of explanation is Just Right. Lots of intuition and basic descriptions of equipment, supported by the right number and level of equations.
Majify, Wilson and Laflamme, Building Quantum Computers: A Practical Introduction is exactly the book I have been looking for. It covers, in up-to-date but not excessively detailed fashion, the important basic technologies of NMR, linear optical, ion trap and superconducting quantum systems. At first I wondered why NMR, which no one is really using these days, but it gives them a great pedagogical opportunity to explain nuclear spin, Larmor precession, RF control pulses and techniques for suppressing errors at the physical level, so it works.
I said it's almost perfect; there are a couple of things I wish it had or had more of. It doesn't cover quantum dots or neutral atoms, both technologies of long standing that had not shown as much progress as the others over the last decade until about the last two years, where they have shown important advances. Even for a book from the future, those advances are probably too new for the authors to have had time to create full chapters on them. Oh, and color centers such as nitrogen vacancy in diamond (NV diamond), but those are currently being used more for communication than computation. Also, since this is a textbook for a course of limited duration, I'm sure they had to make hard choices about what to include and what to defer to later study. And while the book has some nice sketches of hardware systems and a few photos, unfortunately the black and white reproductions aren't great, many of the figures don't indicate scale, and most importantly would love to have twice as many of them. But all of that is easily remedied by showing additional photos and diagrams in class.
In short, the authors have knocked this out of the park. As far as I am concerned, as long as availability is reasonable, this book is IT for explaining quantum computing hardware until it becomes unusably outdated -- something that is hopefully in the distant future, as befits a book from the future itself.
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