It’s been long since researchers first started to dream about quantum computers. These are incredibly fast machines which can solve such extremely complicated tasks that it will revolutionize the application areas.
Looking good to talk about, researchers face some serious problems in their design. The first problem is the transistors, which are the systems that process the signals. In today’s computers this signal is an electric current, but for a quantum computer this will be a photon, which is the smallest component of light.
Photons very rarely interact with each other, consider two beams of light when they meet and cross they don’t interact with each other, rather they just go right through each other. This is called linear optics. Linear optics can never provide an answer to quantum computers. For such machines scientists will have to develop ways that can make two photons interact with each other. This is called non-linear optics.
Non-Linear optics can give us the first quantum computers but it is very difficult to develop a system in which light interacts with each other. Photons are so small that one could never hit another, unless there is something that can control them. This something is the main component of quantum computers that till date was not available. But now researchers from the Neils Bohr Institute at University of Copenhagen and from Harvard University have develop a new theory to solve the puzzle.
Instead of shooting photons at each other from different directions and trying to get them to hit each other, researchers want to use an atom as an intermediary. The atom can absorb one photon, if you direct two photons towards the atom it happens that they will collide on the atom and this is what researchers actually want.
Atoms are so small that to bombard them with photons, researchers have to focus these photons very precisely. Researchers have something to cater to this problem in their store. They know that microwaves could be focused on atoms via superconducting nano-wires. Similarly they can also focus visible light photons on atoms.
In theory there is no question that the model will work, but doing that in reality might require mechanisms never tried before. But once an interaction occurs, photons will be able to exchange their information and this information will be bits which are zero or one. If the research turns out to be fruitful then we can very well see a quantum computer very soon.
Via: Physorg
