The U.S. Air Force is developing simple but reliable quantum computers that can be built with off-the-shelf components, Technology Review Physics arXiv Blog reports.

In recent years, physicists have worked out how to make photons interact using interferometers and to carry out quantum computations using the output of one interferometer as the input for another.

However, interferometers drift and require re-calibrating, so Air Force physicists are developing  holograms of interferometers so that their properties become “frozen” in glass, making them much more stable. The holograms could be used in low-dimensional quantum computations, including quantum memory buses, quantum error correction circuits, and quantum key distribution relays.

Ref.: Warner A. Miller et al., Quantum computing in a piece of glass, arxiv.org/abs/1112.3489