Long live the qubit!
Thursday, June 2, 2011 - 09:30
in Physics & Chemistry
A quantum computer is a device -- still largely theoretical -- that could perform some types of calculations much more rapidly than classical computers. While a bit in a classical computer can represent either 0 or 1, a quantum bit, or qubit, can be in "superposition," representing 0 and 1 at the same time. In experiments, however, keeping qubits in superposition long enough to do anything useful with them has proven very hard.