Can Molecules Beat Moores Law?
SAN JOSE, Calif.— ISAAC CHUANG has built a machine that may one day leave the world’s fastest supercomputers behind, but just now the thing is busy helping its master perform a little magic. Mr. Chuang holds out a paper clip in his cupped hand, and the clip instantly suspends itself in thin air, trapped in a force field generated by the weird device five feet away — a quantum computer. It’s an elaborate parlor trick. But this is an elaborate parlor: I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center, where Mr. Chuang, a physicist, is one of hundreds of people searching out the next frontiers of computation. It’s a submicroscopic realm where the rules can be confounding and the results uncertain. Mr. Chuang’s quantum computer, for example, is based on strange physics that apply when it is possible to control the behavior of individual molecules and atoms. In contrast to conventional computers, which store and retrieve information represented as ones and zeros, quantum machines can simultaneously compute
