A team from the University of New South Wales’ School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, led by Dr. Andrea Morello and Professor Dzurak and including researchers from the University of Melbourne and University College, London, has created the first working quantum bit based on a single atom in silicon. This paves the way to ultra-powerful quantum computers of the future.
A single atom is the prototypical quantum system, and a natural candidate for a quantum bit, or qubit—the elementary unit of a quantum computer. In the paper, published a couple days ago in the journal Nature, the team describes how it was able to both read and write information using the spin, or magnetic orientation, of an electron bound to a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon chip.
Dr. Morello says that quantum computers promise to solve complex problems that are currently impossible on even the world’s largest supercomputers: “These include data-intensive problems, such as cracking modern encryption codes, searching databases, and modelling biological molecules and drugs.”http://youtu.be/veDS0D8lEoMA functional quantum computer will provide much faster computation in three key areas: searching large databases, cracking most forms of modern encryption, and modelling atomic systems such as biological molecules and drugs. This means they’ll be enormously useful for finance and healthcare industries, and for government, security and defense organisations. Functional quantum computers will also open the door for new types of computational applications and solutions that are, at this stage, difficult to conceive or comprehend.The researchers will now work to combine pairs of these devices to create a two-bit logic gate – the basic processing unit of a quantum computer. When they succeed, you can read it here.“For the first time, we have demonstrated the ability to represent and manipulate data on the spin to form a quantum bit, or ‘qubit’, the basic unit of data for a quantum computer,” says Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak. “This really is the key advance towards realising a silicon quantum computer based on single atoms.” He adds. “This is a remarkable scientific achievement – governing nature at its most fundamental level – and has profound implications for quantum computing,”
Credit: Tony Melov
N.Via: Nature
