A regular computer, in contrast, has to carry out each calculation in turn.Manufacturing devices that can store qubits is therefore the most important part of making a quantum computer.
With sufficient cooling, Dr Birkl reckons, these traps could be made to hold on to just one atom each, thereby producing 80 individual qubits.One advantage of this method of making a quantum computer is that the atomic qubit stores can be manipulated relatively easily.
However, making a quantum computer will likely be even harder than making a rudimentary quantum machine.
"A lot of the technologies we developed for this experiment are going to be crucial for making a quantum computer with trapped ions," Jost says.
Some physicists even aspire to create a spooky quantum connection called "entanglement" between spin-polarized currents to make a quantum computer that could crack problems that stymie an ordinary one.
Quantum computing is still very much in the early research stage, but IBM is hoping to accelerate the progress around it by making a quantum computer available to researchers as a cloud service.
"One of the first steps in making a quantum computer is to make a quantum bit," Yazdani said in an email to the Huffington Post, "The ideal quantum bit should [be] one that you can control but it does not interact with its environment, so as to be changed".
Today, though, I and others regularly explain its underlying logic to students by focusing on the simplest imaginable system to which that logic applies: the qubits that make up a quantum computer.
