The promise of ultrafast quantum computing has moved a step closer to reality with a technique to create rewritable computer chips using a beam of light. Researchers from The City College of New York (CCNY) and the University of California Berkeley (UCB) used light to control the spin of an atom's nucleus in order to encode information.
The technique could pave the way for quantum computing, a long-sought leap forward toward computers with processing speeds many times faster than today's. The group will publish their results on June 26 in Nature Communications.
Current electronic devices are approaching the upper limits in processing speed, and they rely on etching a pattern into a semiconductor to create a chip or integrated circuit. These patterns of interconnections serve as highways to shuttle information around the circuit, but there is a drawback.
"Once the chip is printed, it can only be used one way," explained Dr. Jeffrey Reimer, UCB professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and the study co-author.
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