A study published in Advanced Materials reports the first reliable method for precisely arranging individual atoms in a grid, an achievement 25 years in the making. The technique offers near-perfect accuracy and can be scaled up, marking a significant step toward building practical quantum computers. However, major engineering hurdles remain before this vision can become reality.
Quantum computers, in theory, could solve problems that are beyond the reach of traditional, transistor-based computers. One promising approach involves using single atoms in silicon as quantum bits, or qubits. These atoms are cooled to extremely low temperatures to preserve their fragile quantum states, and they can be controlled using electrical and magnetic fields. This allows them to process information similarly to how classical transistors switch between binary states of 0 and 1, except with vastly more complex potential.
This allows the computer to harness the power of quantum mechanics, the deep laws of physics that determine how the universe works. This includes phenomena such as superposition, or the ability of qubits to be in many different arrangements at the same time, and quantum entanglement, which is the ability of qubits to be inextricably linked.
These features mean complex problems can be represented in new ways. For a problem with an exceptionally large number of possible outcomes, a quantum computer is able to consider the possibilities simultaneously, rather than one at a time like a normal computer would – which would take today’s best supercomputer millions of years to process.
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