Chapter 9. Nature’s Perfect Qubits
Atoms on a small scale behave like nothing on a large scale, for they satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics. So, as we go down and fiddle around with the atoms down there, we are working with different laws, and we can expect to do different things…We can use, not just circuits, but some system involving the quantized energy levels, or the interactions of quantized spins.
The argument for using individual atoms for qubits is simple: every atom is identical and is perfectly consistent and predictable according to the rules of the physical world. This is quite unlike anything humans design and fabricate from materials with defects and minute variations. While NMR qubits used molecules as the basis for computation, others sought means to dive deeper into the quantum scale, isolating and manipulating individual atoms in systems that could support computation. In fact, the story of physics is in large part the efforts of experimentalists to extend our perception and awareness down to the subatomic scale, a challenge that is difficult to imagine for those not in the field. The methods employed by these scientists to observe what is beyond the limits of our direct sensory observation are, by necessity, wildly creative.
Subatomic experimentation began in earnest in 1897, when Joseph John Thomson, a British physicist and Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge University, conducted a number of experiments that established the existence ...
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