Innovative Ion Trap on a Semiconductor

Denix writes "MIT's TechnologyReview has an interesting article on a silicon-based "ion trap" in order to host a "qubit." The Ion Trap technology 'uses electric and magnetic fields to isolate a charged particle from its environment -- a prerequisite for exploiting the temperamental quantum properties of electrons."

Comments

Re:How will they be programmed?

[m50d]

C. For the simple reason that if they don't support C, noone will use them. Look at what happened to lisp machines.

Good science, duff reporting

[Richard Kirk]

The devices are made of "Gallium, Aluminium, and Arsenide". The stuff may be called Gallium Aluminium Arsenide, but the element is called Arsenic. If they send you down to stores to get a jar of Arsenide, expect to get left-handed screwdrivers and tartan paint too.

So, the reporter doesn't know his periodic table? I bet he's red-hot at quantum physics, though. Really brilliant and highly trained minds sometimes skip over the basic stuff, yerknow.

Bah.

They're not really super fast.

[Poromenos1]

Quantum computers can factor a number in polynomial time. That's not because they're really fast (they're not doing it in exponential time very fast, but in polynomial), it's because they have quantum properties. To factor a number, they convert the problem into a problem of finding the periodicity of a function, and then exploit the computer's ability to be in all states at the same time, and thus find the period very fast.

They have the potential to do stuff that we do slowly now much faster, but I don't think they will be that unbelievably faster (3,000,000x).