Julie Steenhuysen
Sun
CHICAGO — Suspended in laser light, thousands of atoms pair up and dance, each moving in perfect counterpoint to its partner.
They are the building blocks of what may one day become an enormously powerful quantum computer capable of solving in seconds problems that take today’s fastest machines years to crack, U.S. physicists said on Wednesday.
“You can do the equivalent of multiple classical calculations at the same time in the quantum world,” said Trey Porto, a researcher with the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST, whose work appears in the journal Nature.
Porto and colleagues have coaxed pairs of super-cold rubidium atoms to repeatedly swap positions, a feat that could make them useful for storing and processing data in quantum computers.
In today’s computers, the smallest unit of storage is a binary digit or bit, which can only have two values — zero or one. These form the basis of information storage in digital computing.
“In the quantum world, instead of just the possibilities of zeros and ones, you have a range of possibilities,” Porto said in a telephone interview.
Quantum bits or qubits can also oscillate between the zero and one positions. This flexibility could allow for many calculations to be carried out simultaneously.
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