As I understand it, the Physics ArXiv Blog is not affiliated with the people who actually run the Arxiv (Paul Ginsparg et al.). Which is probably good, as I’m never entirely sure how seriously to take the papers they highlight.
Take yesterday’s post, Diamond Challenges for Quantum-Computing Crown, which is about a paper that asks the question Could one make a diamond-based quantum computer?. It’s an interesting idea, and something I wrote about last year, so it seems like a promising topic.
The preprint in question, though, is a little dodgy. It’s indifferently proofread, with all sorts of odd errors in the text, one citation that appears to be duplicated (Neumann et al.), and one of the first references in the paper, to another work by the same author, goes to a line that just says “(the APS paper)”. This isn’t a preprint, it’s a first draft.
Those things by themselves wouldn’t be too bad, but they come in a paper that has some oddities of style and tone that always make me a little nervous. The paper purports to be a detailed analysis of the feasibility of a diamond-computing scheme proposed by one of the authors, and as such, it comes across as less than perfectly objective. And after listing off all the DiVincenzo criteria for making a quantum computer work, they put off discussion of the readout mechanism to a future paper. Given that readout is one of the key elements needed for a quantum computer, it’s a little tough to claim to be doing a useful analysis of the prospects for making a computer without talking about the readout.
So, I’m kind of dubious about this. Not about the idea of diamond-based quantum computation, which does look like it might have promise, but about this specific paper. And, in turn, about the ArXiv blog.