An exotic light-wielding computer that should be capable of immensely complex calculations has been designed by a team of British and Japanese researchers. Bill Munro and Tim Spiller at Hewlett-Packard's research laboratory in Bristol, UK, and Kae Nemoto from the National Institute for Informatics in Tokyo, Japan, devised the quantum computer, which will control single photons of light using powerful laser pulses in order to process quantum bits - or qubits - of information. Computers that perform calculations by harnessing the bizarre properties of quantum physics – such as the superposition or entanglement of particles – could one day operate at extraordinary speeds. Quantum computers should, for example, be able to perform multiple calculations at once simply by exploiting the fact that quantum particles can simultaneously occupy two distinct states.
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