The SMH reports on the first quantum computer

It is only a tiny device – a flat, pancake-like layer of 300 atoms hovering in space.

Yet it has the potential to provide insights into how materials behave at the quantum level that none of today's conventional computers would be capable of calculating.

When fully operational, its performance could only be matched by an impossibly large machine, said Michael Biercuk, a Sydney physicist and member of the international team that built and tested it.
"The system we have developed has the potential to perform calculations that would require a supercomputer larger than the size of the known universe. And it does it all in a diameter of less than a millimetre," Dr Biercuk, of the University of Sydney, said.

The device, known as a quantum simulator, is just one atom thick.

Its 300 charged beryllium atoms are trapped in suspension by magnetic and electric fields, and their interactions can be controlled by lasers.

 

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