Researchers Create Silicon-Based Quantum Bit 46
angry tapir writes "Researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia have created the world's first working quantum bit based on a single atom in silicon. The research team was able to both read and write information using the spin, or magnetic orientation, of an electron bound to a single phosphorous atom embedded in a silicon chip. In February, UNSW researchers revealed they had successfully created a single-atom transistor using a single phosphorous atom in a silicon crystal."
ONLY A BIT ?? (Score:1, Funny)
Seems like a bit of waste !!
Re:Bit not a Qubit (Score:5, Funny)
No, they've demonstrated a single Qubit.
TFS makes things mucky by mentioning single electron transistors too, which are a completely different beast.
The problem with quantum computing isn't demonstrating single qubits though. The problem is in getting a reasonable number in a superposition. Most I've ever seen in a QC that actually does computations is 7 qubits.
Just to get an idea of the scale we need, Shor's algorithm, the one which we could use to crack RSA encryption in polynomial time, needs 2*N qubits minimum. So to crack RSA1024 we'd need 2048 qubits all in a state of superposition.
I'm of the opinion adding more qubits to a superposition is going to be an exponentially hard problem.
Re:I have a question: (Score:5, Funny)
can you run linux on it?
Nope. Linux requires at least a two bit computer to run.
Re:payback (Score:5, Funny)
Time for us all to learn QCL, Q-Lisp... (Score:2, Funny)
...or some other quantum computer programming language.
(Of course, I suppose that to really do quantum software development correctly, you have to learn to be great at it and totally suck at the same time. Well, at least while no one's watching...)