Scientists in Japan have made a key step toward the development of a quantum computer -- a still largely hypothetical device that would be dramatically more powerful than today's supercomputers -- according to Japanese electronics giant NEC Corp.
In what they claimed was a world first, researchers at NEC and the state-funded Institute of Physical and Chemical Research successfully demonstrated a circuit that can control the state of a pair of elemental particles and how strongly they interact with one another.
Being able to control these particles -- called "qubits" -- in this fashion may help scientists to build a quantum computer, though actually developing one still lays many years in the future, research team member Yasunobu Nakamura said on Wednesday.
The NEC team, led by Tsai Jaw-shen (蔡兆申), published their results on Thursday in the US science journal Science.
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