TOWARDS THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL COMPUTER
- Jacob Sherson, Department of Physics and Astronomy, has taken the first step towards developing the quantum computer, which may become as fast as all the world’s existing computers combined. Photo: Lars Kruse
New ‘super tweezers’ developed by researchers at Aarhus University are an enormous step in the direction of the revolutionary quantum computer.
“I predict that in fifty years we’ll look back on our present computers and laugh just as loudly as we do today when we see a computer from 1960. We all know what a major and unpredictable a revolution the internet has been, and if we can build a quantum computer that works, we’ll experience similar revolutions in the decades ahead.”
This is what Jacob Sherson from the Department of Physics and Astronomy says when asked what his work with manipulating atoms can potentially mean. And the young postdoctoral fellow at Aarhus University has something on which to base his far-reaching predictions. Along with international partners, he is actually the co-designer of special atom tweezers that can manipulate individual atoms and that will, in the long run, pave the way for the Holy Grail of computer technology – the quantum computer.
Two important steps on the way
“Our tweezers are actually a beam of light that exploits the fact that the atoms gravitate towards the most intense part when you point light at them. Once they’re caught, you can move the atoms around and manipulate them however you like.”
Jacob Sherson explains that the new super tweezers, which he has described in the prestigious journal Nature, are one of three things that need to fall into place for the hardware in a quantum computer to be feasible.
“The first step is being able to manipulate the atoms, and we can do that now. The next step is to gather clusters of close to a couple of hundred atoms that can work together. We’ve also done that. All we need now is to develop the technique, so that we can manipulate more atoms at once, and of course, to write the software to match,” he says.
Can be zero and one at the same time
The young postdoctoral fellow emphasises, however, that a number of engineering challenges still need to be solved before the still largely theoretical quantum computer in his laboratory can end up on everyone’s desks. But when it does happen, we will experience something of a revolution.
“A quantum computer will be able to carry out an incredibly large number of calculations at the same time. For example, a quantum computer using the three hundred atoms we’ve managed to collect in the laboratory would be more powerful than all the world’s existing computers combined,” he says.
