The last half of the 20th century, it has been argued with considerable justification, could be called the microelectronics era. During that 50-year period, the world witnessed a revolution based on a digital logic of electrons.
Figure 1. Physicists and engineers are creating an entirely new generation of microelectronic devices that operate on a quantum mechanical property of electrons called "spin" rather than on the electron's electric charge. These investigators are racing to use spin effects to create transistors and more complex circuit elements, including quantum computers, in a field known as spintronics. Shown here is an artist's depiction of a proposal by Bruce Kane, now at the University of Maryland, for a quantum computer based on the nuclear spin of phosphorus atoms (green), which interact by means of spin-polarized atoms (red). The quantum properties of superposition and entanglement may someday permit quantum computers to perform certain types of computations much more quickly using less power than is possible with conventional charge-based devices. For an explanation of how a quantum computer might work, see Figure 7.
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