MIT researchers may have found a way to overcome a key barrier to the advent of super-fast quantum computers, which could be powerful tools for applications such as code breaking.

Quantum computing has been hailed as the next leap forward for computers, promising to catapult memory capacity and processing speeds well beyond current limits. Several challenging problems need to be cracked, however, before the dream can be fully realized.

A team of scientists from Princeton University has found that one of the most intriguing phenomena in condensed-matter physics -- known as the quantum Hall effect -- can occur in nature in a way that no one has ever before seen.

Researchers at the U. S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Microsoft Station Q have made significant advancements in understanding a fundamental problem of quantum mechanics – one that is blocking efforts to develop practical quantum computers with processing speeds far superior to conventional computers.

Forty years ago, mathematician Mark Kac asked the theoretical question, "Can one hear the shape of a drum?"

Scientists at Florida State University’s National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and the university’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry have introduced a new material that could be to computers of the future what silicon is to the computers of today.

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have transferred information between two “artificial atoms” by way of electronic vibrations on a microfabricated aluminum cable, demonstrating a new component for potential ultra-powerful quantum computers of the future.

It might seem like an esoteric achievement of interest to only a handful of computer scientists, but the advent of quantum computers that can run a routine called Shor’s algorithm could have profound consequences. It means the most dangerous threat posed by quantum computing - the ability to break the codes that protect our banking, business and e-commerce data - is now a step nearer reality.

Scientists who dream of shrinking computers to the nanoscale look to atomic spin as one possible building block for both processor and memory, yet setting the spin of an atom, let alone measuring it, has been a challenge.

Like navigating spacecraft through the solar system by means of gravity and small propulsive bursts, researchers can guide atoms, molecules and chemical reactions by utilizing the forces that bind nuclei and electrons into molecules (analogous to gravity) and by using light for propulsion.

Surmounting several distinct hurdles to quantum computing, physicists at Harvard University have found that individual carbon-13 atoms in a diamond lattice can be manipulated with extraordinary precision to create stable quantum mechanical memory and a small quantum processor, also known as a quantum register, operating at room temperature.

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a novel way of making atoms interfere with each other, recreating a famous experiment originally done with light while also making the atoms do things that light just won't do.