Nanotechnology: Congratulations, it's a quantum computer

Project Success Stories - Congratulations, it's a quantum computer

Posted on July 7th, 2010

It is not that simple of course. While microelectronic chips have continued to shrink in size, research into quantum computing - in which the active components often can be measured at the molecular level - is still in its infancy.

'This might provide breakthroughs in high-performance computing in 10 to 20 years,' says Göran Wendin, professor of theoretical physics at the Bionaro System Laboratory at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden. 'But most likely, it will provide a paradigm shift; looking back in 20 years, we will see how technology changed in ways that were difficult to anticipate.'

This research has been largely focused on what are known as ion trap quantum 'computers'. Ion traps are chains of up to ten ionised atoms, each of which can be made to behave like a two-level spin-half system, called a qubit. These qubits have the power to represent significantly more information than a bit in a classical computer, and could one day be used to perform certain types of calculations that classical computers can never do. And if large-scale quantum computers can be built, they will be able to solve certain problems much faster than any current classical computers.

But before we get carried away, it is important to recognise the limitations of current research: as Prof. Wendin points out, a ten-qubit computer is to quantum computing what a 1950s computer was to the dawning digital world. And there is a further difficulty: present ion traps are not scalable. In order to develop larger systems with 50-100 qubits, solid-state nanotechnology is needed to scale down the components and build microtraps in which ions can be stored.

More on [link to www.nanotech-now.com]