Quantum Computing with Superconductors

A quantum computer, a computing device powered by the laws of quantum mechanics, would be capable of solving a class of problems exponentially faster than classical computers. The modern era of superconducting quantum computing began a decade ago with the demonstration of long-lived quantum states in Josephson junction devices. In this talk I travel through the timeline of quantum computing and discuss current challenges. A major problem is to understand how to perform quantum operations fault-tolerantly, and I will discuss the emerging subject of topological quantum error correction in this context.