SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Physicists Create a Working Transistor From a Single Atom
from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Australian and American physicists have built a working transistor from a single phosphorus
atom embedded in a silicon crystal.
The group of physicists, based at the University of New South Wales and Purdue University,
said they had laid the groundwork for a futuristic quantum computer that might one day function
in a nanoscale world and would be orders of magnitude smaller and quicker than today's
silicon-based machines.
In contrast to conventional computers that are based on transistors with distinct "on" and
"off" or "1" and "0" states, quantum computers are built from devices called qubits that exploit
the quirky properties of quantum mechanics. Unlike a transistor, a qubit can represent a
multiplicity of values simultaneously.
Read more...
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