An Australian-led research team said Thursday
they had made a technological breakthrough in the race for a quantum
supercomputer that could revolutionise data encryption and medicine.
Engineers from Sydney's University of New
South Wales said they had created the first working quantum bit or qubit
-- the fundamental unit of a quantum supercomputer -- with the findings
published in the latest edition of Nature.
Lead researcher Andrew Dzurak said the team
used a microwave field to gain unprecedented control over en electron
bound to a single phosphorous atom that was implanted in a silicon
transistor device.
They were able to both write and read
information using the electron's spin, or magnetic orientation, which
Dzurak said was a "key advance towards realising a silicon quantum
computer based on single atoms".
"This is a remarkable scientific achievement,
governing nature at its most fundamental level, and has profound
implications for quantum computing," Dzurak said.
Quantum computing, the next generation in
information technology, harnesses the power of atoms and molecules to
perform calculations and store data, with the potential to be millions
of times more powerful than the most advanced modern computers.
Dzurak's research partner Andrea Morello said
quantum computers, which could run one million parallel computations at
once compared with a desktop PC's single-computation capacity, could do
things that were currently impossible.
"These include data-intensive problems, such
as cracking modern encryption codes, searching databases, and modelling
biological molecules and drugs," he said.
Morello said the study was significant
because it was the first time silicon had been used -- a well understood
and easily accessed material.
"Our technology is fundamentally the same as
is already being used in countless everyday electronic devices, and
that's a trillion-dollar industry," he said.
The next step is to combine qubit pairs into a
"logic gate", which would be the basic processing unit of a quantum
computer, a fully functioning model of which is likely still to be five
to 10 years off.
The research is being funded by the
Australian government, the US Army, the New South Wales state
government, the University of New South Wales and the University of
Melbourne.
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