Boffins pull off room-temp quantum computing with home-grown gems:
"Harvard tech boffins have come up with a way to create a qubit in a solid-state
system at room temperature that can store information for nearly two seconds, an
increase of around six orders of magnitude over the lifespan of earlier systems.
Problem solved. Except for one tiny issue: to do it, the researchers had to use
diamonds. (The gems were lab-grown, so they didn't have to use the world's finite
supply of naturally occurring diamonds – but still, building a computer out of
diamonds is surely not going to be easy, is it?)
"We have a qubit at room temperature that we can measure with very high
efficiency and fidelity. We can encode data in it, and we can store it for a relatively
long time," professor of physics Mikhail Lukin (pictured on the left) said in a canned
statement."
See:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07...m_temperature/