Dr Andrea Morello reported on the progress of a team led by University of New South Wales engineers and physicists which has developed a “single electron reader”, one of the key building blocks needed to make a quantum computer using silicon.
Quantum computers promise exponential increases in processing speed over today’s computers through their use of the “spin” or magnetic orientation of individual electrons to represent data in their calculations.
“Our device detects the spin state of a single electron in a single phosphorus atom implanted in a block of silicon. The spin state of the electron controls the flow of electrons in a nearby circuit,” said Dr Morello, the lead author of the paper entitled Single-shot readout of an electron spin in silicon, which was published recently in the journal Nature.
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