Professor Weimin Chen and his colleagues at Linköping University, in
cooperation with German and American researchers, have succeeded in both
initializing and reading nuclear spins, relevant to qubits for quantum
computers, at room temperature.A quantum computer is controlled by the
laws of quantum physics; it promises to perform complicated
calculations, or search large amounts of data, at a speed that exceeds
by far those that today’s fastest supercomputers are capable of.A
traditional computer stores, processes and sends all information in the
form of bits, which can have a value of 1 or 0. But in the world of
quantum physics, at the nano- and atomic level, other rules prevail and a
bit in a quantum computer – a qubit – can have any value between 1 and
0.
