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There are two things you should know about quantum computing. There’s the physics side of things, and that’s mostly dealing with how to build a quantum computer. There’s also a computer science side of it, commonly referred to as quantum information theory (I think this is the right buzz word…). The CS guys are obviously only interested in how someone would actually use a quantum computer, writing effective algorithms for them, programming them, etc. With the physicists and building quantum computers, there are tons of ideas on how to do this. Amongst them are crystals/optical, quantum dot, and bose-einstein condensates. There are more, but I can’t remember them off the top of my head. A lot of them could be considered the same if not very similar, but condensed matter has been making lots of progress and it seems to be the favorite. In condensed matter, there’s theoretical physicists working in there as well as experimentalists that actually trap the atoms and try and put them together to make qubits. Lots of these efforts are being worked on by people with electrical engineering backgrounds, solid state physics, and other disciplines related to the two.</p>
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Computer science would be your best bet, better than IT because it’ll give you a more in-depth understanding of how computers actually work. There are tons of people out there willing to pay big bucks for people with skills in high performance computing to babysit their machines and figure out how to program them effectively (wall st. comes to mind, as well as a lot of computational sciences/applied mathematics).</p>
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Computer engineering, though of course it’s the mechanical engineers who actually build the parts of the robot, you’re just building the circuits and controls and possibly the software.</p>
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Computer science, definitely.</p>
<p>It looks like your best bet is to go with an EE/CS degree, or physics. Depends on which you like more. Some of these fields, like high performance computing/massive parallel processing or quantum computing are interdisciplinary fields. A physicist, electrical engineer, or computer scientist can be working on these problems, and in graduate school the lines are especially blurred. Of course, not everything you learn in those disciplines will be applicable to the research you want to do, so that’s why you ought to pick the one you’re most interested in. Safest bet would probably be EE I’d say, with physics graduate school is a must, though plenty of people find good jobs in CS as well.</p>