Researchers at NIST have created a programmable, 2-qubit quantum processor.
Mr. Hanneke suggests that while this is just the first 2-qubit processor, one could combine many such processors by linking them together.
Qubits, are roughly similar to the ‘bits’ used in traditional computing, except that qubits can be both 1 & 0 at the same time. The NIST processor uses ultraviolet lasers to manipulate individual atoms to track such qubit information.
This is a big step towards ‘Quantum Computing,’ which is a new kind of computing that would (it doesn’t exist yet) use stuff much smaller than electrons to process data. This is science fiction slowly becoming reality here. The final product will probably depend on this other research being done on quantum teleportation.
