Creating quantum-computers is hard. You’re working with nano-sized devices, which are hard to manipulate, hard to connect to the outside world, extremly fragile, basically a bitch to work with.
Geordie from D-Wave, a quantum-company in Canada, bloged about how they build big-scale quantum-devices through exploting superconduction. They cool down niobium, a transition metal, until it becomes a superconductor (that would be 9.2 Kelvin) – a bunch of superconducting niobium-atoms behave like they would be only one atom instead of many. Speaking of quantum-mechanics they really behave like one single big atom – therefore you can use it for quantum-experiments.
So instead of using very few individual atoms for building up a quantum-chip, they use many atoms, cool them down until they become a superconductor (and possibly an Einstein-Bose condensate, see below) – voila!
Unfortunately my knowledge about that topic ain’t not enough to completly understand the implications, but as i understand it – and i invite you to correct me – is that the niobium-devices they build get cooled down until they become an Einstein-Bose condensate, start behaving like one atom on a macroscopic scale, therefore behave like a blown-up version of single-atom quantum-devices.
Now how cool is that? Pretty cool.
Picture courtesy of Florian Marquardt, released under the GNU FDL.
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