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'Laser Tweezers' Used to Sort Atoms

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the like-plucking-nosehairs-only-less-painful dept.

luckyguesser writes to tell us that Physicists at the University of Bonn are claiming to have knocked down one more quantum computing hurdle. Utilizing what they term "laser tweezers" they were able to sort and align seven atoms while capturing it on film. The plan is to construct a quantum gate using atoms imprinted with data.

2 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. How many of these to make a computer? by jmcwork · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I thought I remembered reading that these quantum level gates would need to be redundant to get stable state information - something on the order of 1k quantum gates per transister based gate. If this is true, how long would it take to produce a computer? Years? Not a knock against the results - just a question.

  2. Re:quantum fuzzy logic by The+Philosophers+Cat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think you might be getting a little confused. For Quantum Computing you need the atoms/qbits to be entangled with each other and then seperated and for them to remain that way. You can't achieve this in a crystal (well you might achieve entanglement, but it'll be hard to remove the entangled atom and make it interact with a completely different atom without destroying the existing entanglement).

    Its not about getting them "aligned perfectly", rather its about controlling the atoms without introducing noise to the system. This is why the laser approach has a significant advantage. Although I agree that a clock speed of 0.5Hz isn't particularly impressive! but they do say its not about clock speed but number of operations per second (do I hear someone from AMD shouting "hell yeah!"). And with QC's the number of equivalent FLOPS you can do for something like quick searching rises exponentially with the number of atoms you have!