The Qubit's Ruse

Science has advanced one step closer towards offering quantum computing in semiconductors.

A recent Nature Physics journal paper currently online presents how researchers created a new, hybrid molecule in which its quantum state can be intentionally manipulated. This is a necessary step on the road to offering quantum computers, which promise to eclipse current capabilities.

If a traditional computer was to look up a person's phone number in a telephone book, it would look at each name in order until it found the right number. Computers, which store information in patterns of 1s and 0s, can do this much faster than people. But it is still a sequential task.

But a quantum computer could look at all of the names in the telephone book simultaneously. It would carry information using quantum bits, or qubits, allowing it to process exponentially more information.

Quantum computers also could take advantage of the bizarre behaviors of quantum mechanics - some of which are counterintuitive even to physicists - in ways that are hard to fathom. For example, two quantum computers could, in concept, communicate instantaneously across any distance imaginable, even across solar systems.

Albert Einstein, in a letter to Erwin Schrödinger in the 1930s, wrote that in a quantum state a keg of gunpowder would have both exploded and unexploded molecules within it (a notion that led Schrödinger to create his famous cat-in-a-box thought experiment).

This "neither here nor there" quantum state is what can be controlled in this new molecule simply by altering the voltage of the transistor.

-- LiveScience Staff

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