Plans made to demonstrate the device at an industry event later this year

The BBC is reporting that a UK start-up company, Orca Computing, says it has made one of the world’s smallest quantum computers.

Orca Computing, founded two years ago by Oxford academics led by Professor Ian Walmsley, whose work on photonics is at the heart of the company, says its novel approach will make quantum computing more commercially viable. Its chief executive, Richard Murray, plans to demonstrate the device at an industry event later this year.

One expert said the challenge would be scaling it up to make it powerful. Most of the major players in this field, including Google and IBM, use an approach involving freezing qubits, the building blocks of a quantum computer, down to near absolute zero. And this means large machines with costly infrastructure around them.

Opening what looks like a standard server cabinet in Orca’s compact offices, Murray contends that his company is completely changing the way people view quantum computers. The promise of quantum computing is that it will solve problems beyond standard computers, helping to combat climate change, accelerate artificial intelligence or develop new drugs.

However, devices with hundreds, perhaps even millions of qubits, may be needed before those kinds of challenges can be addressed. The Orca computer has just four, leaving it a long way behind rivals.

But the company says it will be able to scale up quickly over the next two years. One of the UK’s leading quantum-computing experts, Professor John Morton of University College London, explains that using photons is a perfectly valid method.

However, Orca’s four-qubit machine has about the same power as a thermostat or an Apple Watch.

“It’s in an earlier stage in terms of qubit number than what Google and Rigetti and IBM are doing with superconducting qubits,” Morton says while acknowledging that scaling up is likely to be a major challenge.

Orca has some funding from the government, which has stressed its ambition to make the UK a centre of quantum computing and also provided funds to encourage American company, Rigetti to build a quantum computer in the UK.