Computers are normally limited by the fixed nature of their
chipsets: once the silicon is out of the factory, its
capabilities are forever locked in. The City College of New York
and University of California Berkeley have jointly developed a
technique that could break chips free of these prisons and speed
along quantum computing. They found that hitting gallium
arsenide with a laser light pattern aligns the spins of the
atoms under the rays, creating a spintronic circuit that can re-
map at a moment's notice. The laser could be vital to quantum
computers, which can depend heavily or exclusively on
spintronics to work: a simple shine could get electrons storing
a much wider range of numbers and consequently handling many
more calculations at once. Research is only just now becoming
public, however; even though gallium arsenide is common in
modern technology, we'll need to be patient before we find
quantum PCs at the local big-box retail chain. Despite this, we
could still be looking at an early step in a shift