Computing with a single qubit faster than the computation quantum speed limit

Abstract

The possibility to save and process information in fundamentally indistinguishable states is the quantum mechanical resource that is not encountered in classical computing. I demonstrate that, if energy constraints are imposed, this resource can be used to accelerate information-processing without relying on entanglement or any other type of quantum correlations. In fact, there are computational problems that can be solved much faster, in comparison to currently used classical schemes, by saving intermediate information in nonorthogonal states of just a single qubit. There are also error correction strategies that protect such computations.