June 30, 2010 Since Richard Feynman's first envisioned the
quantum computer in 1982, there have been many studies of
potential candidates -- computers that use quantum bits, or
qubits, capable of holding an more than one value at a time and
computing at speeds far beyond existing silicon-based machines
for certain problems. Most of these candidate systems, such as
atoms and semiconducting quantum dots, work for quantum
computing, but only at very low temperatures. Now a team of
researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics,
the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Hefei National
Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale at the
University of Science and Technology of China has made a step
toward a warmer solution. As reported in the journal Applied
Physics Letters, published by the American Institute of Physics
(AIP), the team is exploring the capabilities of diamond
nitrogen vacancy (NV) materials. In this material, a "molecule"
at the heart of an artificially created diamond film co