By Peter Weiss
Computers exploiting the oddities of quantum mechanics may eventually put conventional computers to shame. Theoretically, full-fledged versions of those quantum machines will someday master in an eye blink mathematical puzzles and secret codes that current supercomputers wouldn’t crack with a billion years of number crunching.
The exotic innards of such quantum computers may prove to be unlike anything used in computers today (SN: 8/26/00, p.132: Computation Takes a Quantum Leap). Instead of chips with billions of transistors, just a few hundred charged atoms, or ions, in an ultracold refrigerator may carry out the complex computations. Or perhaps laser beams bouncing around a maze of lenses and mirrors will do the job. Alternatively, vials of liquid chemicals under the control of devices similar to hospitals’ magnetic resonance imaging scanners may also serve as quantum processors.