What Is Quantum Tunelling Simple Terms?

What is quantum tunelling simple terms?

Okay. So the way current computers work is that t use electricity to process information. Modern computers only use 2 states. Either no electricity is flowing (0) or there is electricity (1). This might sound complicated but it's pretty easy. Think of a lamp. If you turn the switch off no current is flowing and the lamp is off. This represents a 0. Vice versa, opening the switch allows current to flow and the lamp turns on. This would be a 1. You can use these 1's and 0's to do simple logic. For example, imagine a lamp with 2 switches along the cord. The lamp will only turn on when both switches are closed. This represents a logical AND gate. Swap the switches for electronic transistors and this is all your computer is doing. You can combine logic gates to make a circuit that can add binary numbers together, or a bit of memory, or a control unit. With a complicated enough set of logic gates you can do all sorts of math, render video or browse Quora. We've gotten quite good at making those complicated circuits. But we're starting to hit some issues. For example, it is getting hard to cool those circuits so t don't break themselves. We're also hitting other, more fundamental limits related to the size of these transistors (Can't make a circuit out of half an atom....). So a lot of people are trying to figure out new ways of making better computers. A Quantum computer doesn't use a flow of electrons, but rather uses sets of individual particles such as photons. These particles can be processed within the computer similarly to the way that a normal computer processes electricity, but with a small caveat. the particles don't always land exactly on a 1 or 0 after an operation. Instead, after being manipulated the particle has a certain probability of being in either state. This is a unique feature of quantum-bits (Q-bits) and allows for some oddities in the computing, such as massively paralleled processing. And then there's one final oddity with Q-bits that has to be considered when working with them, when you measure it (look at it to see its value) it is always a 1 or 0, so you can't measure the process until it's done. As a result, Quantum Computers are still not fully understood (how to build/program them) but their properties offer an interesting pallet of tools that fascinate scientists. There are a few problems that are hard to solve using normal computers. Quantum computing is an attempt to exploit this trick. For example, figuring out by what primes a number can be divided. The only way to do this with conventional computers is to check every single prime, which takes a bloody long time if the number you're dividing is big. A quantum computer tries to solve that problem by making probability waves interact so that correct answers are amplified and false answers are negated. If we get it working correctly you could add a "quantum computing card" to your computer to solve those problems extremely quickly. The same way you add a graphics card to quickly render video.