Tiny wires may accelerate quantum computing

ABC News reports.

The ultra-thin wires could play a vital role in the development of the next generation of quantum computers.

According to The Times of India, experiments and atom-by-atom supercomputer models of the wires have found that they maintain a low capacity for resistance despite being more than 20 times thinner than conventional copper wires in microprocessors.

For engineers, it could provide a roadmap to future nanoscale computational devices where atomic sizes are at the end of Moore's law.

For computer scientists, it places donor-atom based silicon quantum computing closer to realisation, say scientists from the University of New South Wales, Melbourne University and Purdue University.

Demonstrating electric transport in a wire so small is "quite an accomplishment", CNET quotes Volker Schmidt, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, in Halle, Germany, as saying.

"And being able to fabricate metallic wires of such dimensions, by this theoretically microelectronics-compatible approach, could be a potentially interesting route for silicon-based electronics."