How has The Rydberg blockade principle impacted Quantum Computing?
The Rydberg blockade principle was named for Johannes Rydberg, a Swedish mathematician and physicist in the late 1800s. He developed a formula that predicted the wavelengths of energy emitted when an atom changes energy levels. Later, Niels Bohr based his Nobel Prize-winning atomic model theory in part on Rydberg’s formula. Even though Bohr’s model had flaws, it was absorbed into the original quantum theory, named for the Latin term “quantum.” Quantum theory tells us that energy actually exists in very small, discrete packets, each of which is called an individual “quantum” of energy. Quantum theory later became the theory of quantum mechanics, which explains more accurately how the world works on the scale of atoms, electrons and other subatomic particles. Objects this small behave much differently than do objects in our everyday world, often in ways that go against intuition. For example, if two ping pong balls come close together but don’t touch, they have no affect on each other. B
