Call it one of the world’s smallest cat videos. To demonstrate an advance that could one day help build a type of quantum computer, researchers have made a cartoon of Schrödinger’s cat—the infamous hypothetical feline that’s dead and alive at the same time—using hundreds of individual atoms, rearranged as often as once every 60 milliseconds.
When you scroll through videos on your phone or click on your favorite website, your computer is constantly manipulating binary strings of 0s and 1s, each of which is represented in the computer’s hardware as a bit that can be either a 0 or a 1. Within devices known as quantum computers, however, the basic building blocks of computation are so-called qubits that can act as 0, 1, or a fragile combination of the two. This setup lets quantum computers solve specific kinds of problems far more efficiently than classical computers can. But there’s a problem: Qubits are extremely delicate.
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