Wow! What is next ?
If they can get room temperature superconductors - we will all be happy!
One of the very many reasons there won't be quantum computing any time soon is that the quantum bits (qubits) need to be at absolute zero - not very practical for the average server room, much less the lowly desktop. Mikhail Lukin, Georg Kucsko and Christian Latta 'The room temperature thing is good, but how do we get rid of …
Glad to see carbon making a comeback here. Back in the day (12yrs... ?) we tried using populated buckyballs inside carbon nanotubes to create qubits in a structure with direction dependent conductivity for read/write addressing.
It was all a bit of a pipe dream. The problem was getting the nanotubes to line up nicely. They really didn't line up well, tangled up like steel wool. Got some great pics of N (and various other elements and molecules) inside C60 inside nanotubes though :-)
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Basically, the problem is too much excitement.
They now know what they are doing -which is slightly different to knowing how to do it.
When it comes to explaining/understanding science things it pays to remember certain "tells" such as :
"Massive amounts of" or
"What we need is"
Definitely a promising architecture. I don't have access to the Science article, but I found a preprint from the same group describing it: http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.2864 .
Maybe the boffins hope this technology will be used for securing bank transactions, but I bet their military backers instead want to use it for snooping on civilian communications using Shor's algorithm. DARPA, AFOSR (Air Force Office of Scientific Research) and MURI (a DoD grant program) are listed as funders.