The University of New South Wales, working with Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, is celebrating what it hopes will be another step towards large-scale quantum computing: a technique that can address single electron qubits separated by mere nanometres.
Quantum bits – qubits – are the quantum-physics counterpart to the binary bits that make up data stored in today’s digital computers – except that whereas your traditional binary bit is either 1 or 0, a qubit can be 1, 0 or what’s known as a superposition of both. A quantum computer should be able to use this property to process huge numbers of calculations in parallel.
But at some point classical binary data will need to be written to a line of qubits, which is where today’s research comes in.
via The Register