After years of slow progress, researchers may finally be seeing a clear path forward in the quest to build powerful quantum computers. These machines are expected to dramatically shorten the time required for certain calculations, turning problems that would take classical computers thousands of years into tasks that could be completed in hours.
A team led by physicists at Stanford University has developed a new kind of optical cavity that can efficiently capture single photons, the basic particles of light, emitted by individual atoms. Those atoms serve as the core components of a quantum computer because they store qubits, which are the quantum equivalent of the zeros and ones used in traditional computing. For the first time, this approach allows information to be collected from all qubits at once.
In research published in Nature, the team describes a system made up of 40 optical cavities, each holding a single atom qubit, along with a larger prototype that contains more than 500 cavities. The results point to a realistic route toward building quantum computing networks that could one day include as many as a million qubits.
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