Word: qubit
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...only because of its massive information-storage capacity. One of the marvelous little wrinkles of the quantum world is a condition known as superposition, in which a particle can occupy two states at the same time. (Don't ask; it just can.) For this reason, a quantum bit, or qubit, can store two numbers at once. Each qubit added to a quantum computer doubles the size of the system, so if you want to know the capacity of a computer that contains 300 qubits, take the number 2 and multiply it by itself 300 times. "That's more than...
...latest of a steady stream of small developments, researchers in the Netherlands and Japan reported in the journal Science last week that they had caused an electrical current in a superconducting ring to flow simultaneously clockwise (representing 1) and counterclockwise (0). The result was a "qubit," a quantum representation of both the digits of binary arithmetic. In other labs, qubits have been devised from single atoms. Whatever is used as the quantum abacus beads, the result is an exponential explosion in computing power...
Every time you add a qubit to the string, the computing power doubles. A row of 11 atoms will carry out 2,048 simultaneous calculations, and a row of 12 will do 4,096. By the time you get to just 14 atoms, a speck still far too tiny to see, you can do more calculations in tandem (16,384) than the fastest supercomputer in the U.S.--a machine at Los Alamos National Laboratory so voracious that it draws several megawatts of power...
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