Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Science 23 April 2004:
Vol. 304. no. 5670, pp. 524 - 525
DOI: 10.1126/science.1097442
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Perspectives

PHYSICS:
Coupling Qubits by Waves on the Electron Sea

L. I. Glazman and R. C. Ashoori

There is great interest in exploiting the unique behavior of quantum systems for computation, but building real devices has proved difficult. One approach is to use electron spin to represent the qubits (quantum bits) in a computational device. In their Perspective, Glazman and Ashoori discuss results reported in the same issue by Craig et al. on using quantum dots as quantum logic elements. The dots act as artificial atoms, with the number of electrons on each subject to control. The electron spins in a pair of quantum dots interact with each other, and the Kondo effect enables detection of the state of the spin pair. This ability to control and detect the interaction between the spins may one day find use in quantum computation.

L. I. Glazman is in the Department of Physics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. E-mail: glazman{at}physics.spa.umn.edu R. C. Ashoori is in the Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. E-mail: ashoori{at}mit.edu

Read the Full Text

To Advertise     Find Products

Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)