Quantum computers go silicon
While not very powerful, the machine is ‘a big symbolic step’
For quantum computers, silicon’s springtime may finally have arrived.
Silicon-based technology is a late bloomer in the quantum computing world, lagging behind other methods. Now for the first time, scientists have performed simple algorithms on a silicon-based quantum computer, physicist Lieven Vandersypen and colleagues report online February 14 in Nature.
The computer has just two quantum bits, or qubits, so it can perform only rudimentary computations. But the demonstration is “really the first of its kind in silicon,” says quantum physicist Jason Petta of Princeton University, who was not involved with the research.