Published in Nature, 2 Jun 2010
UK physicists have made a key step towards practical quantum computing: they have created a light source that fires entangled photons when triggered by an electric current.
Quantum computers exploit the inherent uncertainties of quantum physics to perform calculations much faster than computers currently in use. Whereas conventional ‘bits’ of information take only the values zero or one, quantum bits, or ‘qubits’, exist in a fuzzy superposition of both. In theory, this ambiguity allows any number of qubits to be lumped together or ‘entangled’ and processed in parallel, so that a huge number of calculations can be made at once. […]
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