Belle Dumé writes on physicsworld.com that silicon carbide, a material that is already widely used in high-power electronics, could also be used for quantum information processing. So say researchers in the US who have studied point defects in the material. These defects, similar to ones found in diamond, contain electron spin states that can be controlled coherently and manipulated as quantum bits (qubits) using light.
A quantum computer exploits the ability of a quantum particle to be in a “superposition” of two or more states at the same time. By encoding information into qubits based on such particles, a quantum computer could, in principle, outperform a classical computer on certain tasks. For example, a quantum computer should be good at code decryption, because its processing speed should increase exponentially with the number of qubits involved. In practice, however, physicists have struggled to create even the simplest quantum computer because the fragile nature of these quantum states means that they are easily destroyed and difficult to control.
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